low light mixes

Photo by Alex on Unsplash   Back in January Paul emailed me about an album called "Bardo Tank" by Ron Miles playing trumpet in The Tank in Colorado. That email started me off in search of tunes for what became my "Resonant Spaces" mix. Paul went a different direction and sought out tracks for an ambient trumpet mix. The result is a great collection of tunes that span different styles and old to ne...

    What if the original Blade Runner film had a pop music soundtrack? You know how some films have an instrumental score but also an album of pop/rock tunes that were used in the film or inspired by the film. If Blade Runner had such a collection maybe it would sound like this mix. This all started when I was listening to Pink Floyd - Shine On You Crazy Diamond part 1 and I thought that it sounde...

    This year I've had the good fortune of posting several cool guest mixes and that continues with this excellent collection from Brad Deschamps of Polar Seas Recordings. https://polarseasrecordings.bandcamp.com/ It's not a mix of all Polar Seas releases, in fact only the opening and closing tracks are from the label. But it is perfect timing for a mix from Brad because Polar Seas is releasing th...

  As I've said here before, solo piano is wonderfully evocative of falling snow. So this mix is a collection of piano tracks that remind me of snow. All the tunes are new, being from 2020 or 2021. Including the opening track from a forthcoming album on Whitelabrecs, i=r by Lorenzo Masotto   https://whitelabrecs.bandcamp.com/album/i-r There's not much else to say other than enjoy this last snow mix...

    This mix is nice and straightforward - no funky locations, no focus on a single instrument - just straight up ambient. The closest thing to a theme would be that all the tracks are from 2021.   In trying to come up with a title for the mix, I looked through a list I keep of possible titles. If I hear an interesting phrase or combo of words I'll jot it down to possibly use later. In this case I...

  Somehow last year I missed the album Transcendence by Sherry Finzer. https://heartdancerecords.bandcamp.com/album/transcendence It's an album of solo flute improvisations recorded in an old water tank in Rangely, Colorado. It definitely has the same feel as Paul Horn's Inside the Great Pyramid from 1976. As I listened to it, I wondered if I could collect enough tracks to make a mix of music reco...

  Photo by  Nick Reynolds  on  Unsplash   I am so psyched to have another excellent guest mix. This one comes from long-time friend of the blog, Innesti - innesti.bandcamp.com I have featured a bunch of Innesti music over the years and have hosted guest mixes from him as well. A couple of days ago I got an email asking if I was interested in another guest mix of  ambient vaporwave tunes. Aww, hell...

  As I type this we are getting pounded with another 9" of snow, the second pounding in less than a week. Combine that with semi-lockdown we are still under and it sort of feels like I'm in a research station outpost about to hunker down for The Long Polar Night. Most of the titles fit the theme as well as the feel of the tunes.. I added some weather radio recordings throughout the mix which I thi...

    Great minds think alike. Both Paul and I had the idea of doing a "bell" based mix. I, however, am a procrastinator, and after creating a save folder for bell tunes 3 months ago, I have one track in it. So who knows when that puppy was going to get done. Paul, on the other hand, sought out tracks and compiled them into a perfect playlist that became this mix - Bell Tone Meditation. Here's what...

    I've been a fan of halftribe(Ryan Bissett) ever since he approached me about doing a guest mix roughly 6 years ago - whoa, blows my mind that it was that long ago. Whether it's deep & dubby or straight up ambient, halftribe has released some of my favorite albums over the last 5 or 6 years. So I was excited when Ryan agreed to do a guest mix.  Here's what Ryan said about the mix: "It's been a...

    I was fishing around for an idea for a new mix and mother nature helped out by dropping some fresh snow overnight so that became the theme - The Silence of Snow. I took the picture above on a morning walk through a local nature preserve.   The first draft of this mix had several piano based pieces. I think piano tunes do a nice job of conjuring up snow but I decided to pull them and save them...

  by Sven Geier - sgeier.net   We end the year as we began - with a mix from Paul Asbury Seaman. And a fine way to end the year it is. All of the music in this set is from 2020, making it an appropriate way to say goodbye to this tumultuous year. Here's what Paul says about the mix: “Stillness within motion is a concept that comes from Zen Buddhism and the martial arts. It always seemed to me a go...

  I always label these lists and mixes as "Best Ambient," but with so much music released each year, coming up with a true best list is almost impossible. So this is really more of a list and mix of my favorite ambient albums of the year. Best of 2020 just sounds better. I don't about you but I bought a lot of ambient music this year thanks to Bandcamp Fridays. Through regular purchases and specia...

  I listen to as much indie music as I do ambient music. I always keep a list of favorite albums and favorite songs of the year. As I was looking at some of my favorite songs I noticed that several of them were quiet tunes that would be appropriate for an LLM mix. So I grabbed those and a few more favs and came up with "Quiet Indie Songs of 2020." Squirrel Flower was my big discovery this year. I'...

    2020, you unrelenting bastard. Now you've taken Harold Budd from us. An icon in ambient music. There's not much I can say right now except that I love his music. I have about 25 albums by Harold Budd. His music has been with me for more than 40 years. When I heard the news I knew the only tribute I could do was a mix. So here it is an hour-long mix that barely scratches the surface of his outp...

        A perfect mix for the end of 2020 comes to us from Paul Asbury Seaman. All soundtrack cuts, all with varying degrees of melancholy, all forming an ideal coda for 2020.   Here's what Paul says about the mix:   “I’ve been sitting on this playlist for more than three years. Never got around to firming it up for a Low Lights mix. It dawned on me just the other day that the eight movies from wh...

    I'm in the process of making lists of my top 5 instrumental albums for each year from 1970 to the present. Yeah, it's going take a while. So I was digging around in my music hard drive looking for music that would fit those lists and I stumbled upon the track Tulpa Ovi by Robag Wruhme. I immediately loved the feel of tune and knew I needed it in a mix.   The cut has a feeling of motion similar...

    As is well documented in this blog, I am a space nerd. Over the years I have posted a ton of mixes related to the cosmos. Whether it's a stargazing mix or a celebration of the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle or a requiem for a dying space probe, ambient/electronic music is the perfect companion for turning your gaze to the heavens. Over the last couple of months we've been treated to bea...

    Off-kilter, strange, a bit askew, weird, oblique - are all ways to describe this mix. It's a little creepy too which makes for a perfect mix for Spooky Season. To create a Halloween mix it would be easy to grab some dark, dissonant ambient but as I've said before I'm not a dark ambient fan. So I went for the same feel I have used in the past - tunes that are a bit off-center. Tunes that make y...

  photo courtesy of https://unsplash.com/@coleito     I started this mix on a cold, rainy fall day with no theme or plan. The first track I laid down was from  Progressions by Anthéne and Andrew Tasselmyer  on Constellation Tatsu. Listening to it, the track seemed perfect for a grey autumn day.  Now I had my theme or vibe. From there I just browsed my new releases folder to come up with an ambient...

      sounds swim all around drifting in the warm embrace of this strange beauty   This my second 4th world mix and it's similar to the 2018 version. It still follows the Jon Hassell esthetic of  "a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques." Most of the tracks are new, 10 of the 17 tracks being from 2019 or 2020. I was almost...

  This mix came about because I wanted to find a vehicle for some of the great music coming out of Lost Tribe Sound and their Fearful Void series. The bundle of releases includes 15 albums to be released between June 2020 and June 2021. You can find more info here...   https://losttribesound.bandcamp.com/album/fearful-void-series   Like the website says Lost Tribe Sound "specializes in organic and...

    Sometime in the last couple of weeks we got a good downpour here at Low Light headquarters. As I stood at the front door smelling the rain, listening to the cloudburst, I realized that I had some music playing softly in the background and it blended perfectly with the storm. I stood there for a good twenty minutes taking it all in. This mix is based on that experience.   The main idea here is...

  This mix, like the title, is simple. It's straight forward ambient music. Nice and relaxing, beatless, drifting ambient music. All of the music is new - 9 of the 12 tracks are from 2020. Other than that there's not much else to say except I hope enjoy the tunes. Cheers!   T R A C K L I S T : 00:00    Andrew Chalk - Mikhail (One Long Year 2019) 09:00    Ylowknfe - Gamma (= 2014) 15:55    Innesti...

image by Thomas Park   This mix was a lot of fun!  Back in April, Peter van Cooten, of  Ambientblog , created the awesome mix,  Lockdown . After it posted we talked about doing a collaboration mix. As Peter is in Holland and I am in the States we would send files back and forth to each other adding more tracks with every pass. We had to decide on a theme and a format. In the end the format became...