low light mixes

This mix grew out of a collection of vacation songs.  I wanted to put some tunes together for relaxing on the pier or around the fire.  Once I started finding songs I decided to make all of them vocal acoustic tunes and the rest just fell into place.  The whole mix is nice and slow and quiet.  And of course acoustic. There are a few great covers here, like the Sarah Jarosz & Phosphoerscent covers....

Back in July I featured a guest mix from halftribe.  It was an excellent mix & a nice break for me.  Well, Ryan Bissett(halftribe) has kindly offered another mix and I jumped at the chance to post it. This mix is absolutely pure ambient bliss.  A beautiful collection perfect for any time of year or any time of day.  I've been listening to it at work and have used it as sleep material as well.  Giv...

cinemagraph by Julien Douvier - http://juliendouvier.tumblr.com/ Sometimes I go through phases of music listening.  I'll listen to a bunch of old prog rock for two weeks then move on.  I pull out some old Cantebury Scene stuff from the 70s for awhile.  Then I'll go on an early 80s new wave binge.  Then Americana.  Then ECM jazz. This mix came out one such binge.  I've been listening to a lot of Je...

You're driving, and it's dark and it's raining, and you're on the edge of the city and you've been driving all night. And you took a turn back there but you're not sure it was the right turn. But you took the turn anyway, just kept going in that direction. And somehow it looks sort of familiar, so you just keep driving. Hello. Excuse me. Can you tell me where I am? You've been on this road before....

This is one of those mixes where the title pretty much says it all...Summer Sleeps.  I found that if I keep titles fairly straight forward and clear that plays on Mixcloud go up a bit. I listen to music every night when I go to bed.  And lately I was getting bored with old sleep mixes so of course the solution is to make a new one.  There's not much else to say about this mix, just lay back and zz...

The timing on this could be better.  I've been very busy lately and haven't been able to do a mix.  So it's the perfect time for a guest mix. This mix comes to us from Ryan Bissett who produces ambient music as Halftribe.  What I love about guest mixes is that I'm usually unfamiliar with many of the tracks.  And this mix does exactly that.  Only two artists were known to me before I heard this mix...

I know this blog is supposed to be about ambient music but over the years I've posted some outliers - "Quintessential Jazz" "Footsteps" "Psalms and Lullabies" "Sunday Morning Music" "Vox Electronix" and some other odd balls.  It gets a little boring just mixing nothing but floating ambient so it's nice to branch out every now and then. This mix, "Always & Forever," is definitely on a different bra...

I've already done a "Favorite Ambient Albums" mix and a "Favorite Ambient Artists" mix so it makes sense that there would eventually be a "Favorite Ambient Tracks" mix.  And here it is. Ambient music is definitely not a song based genre.  I like to remember works as a whole or an artist's work as a whole.  There are artists that I absolutely love but can't name more than a handful of specific tune...

Grab a cup of coffee and the paper with this mix as your Sunday soundtrack. This iteration of the Sunday morning series uses mostly new music including a couple of great Bob Dylan covers from Sarah Jarosz and Phosphorescent.  I couldn't resist starting the mix with the wonderful "Morning" from Beck's new release. From there we move on to a beautiful, jazzy track from Philémon Chante that I have be...

Most regular visitors to this blog are aware that I also post these mixes over at Mixcloud.  I love Mixcloud.  I got in very early on and so have developed quite a few followers.  It's been fun watching it grow.   One thing that has helped in growing that following is being one of the featured cloudcasts in the Ambient/Chillout category.  Well, apparently now Low Light Mixes is also one of the fea...

One of the benefits of making & posting mixes for all these years is getting to know some like-minded folks from around the world.  One of those is my good friend, Jason O'Gorman, from the city of Cork in Ireland. Jason did a guest mix for me way back in 2008.  Wow, typing that just made me realize that Low Light Mixes has been around for a long time - 8 years this month, an eternity in internet y...

stirring up the dust ghosts from the past whisper in grooves of forever There's a first for this blog - vinyl haiku.  I was looking for ways to describe this mix and as I collected expressive words, the list started to take on it's own poetic quality.   So I thought, what the heck, I'll just formalize it into an actual haiku.  It was fun, I haven't written any sort of silly haiku in years. Anyway,...

This mix is a rare treat.  It's a guest mix from Chris Fraley.  I know Chris through correspondence and postings at the Hypnos Forum.   I've been a member of the forum for a long time and I really enjoy the community there.  In this time of social networks and twitter it's nice to see that a classic forum still survives and thrives, mainly because of a shared love of ambient music.  Activity there...

It is freakin' cold here in Wisconsin right now.  It's going to be -20f below zero tonight and the high temp on Monday didn't get much above -10f.  Frigid temps like that call for a mix. It's perfect timing for a freezing mix because a recent purchase was the album arctic conditions by stormloop.   With song titles like "Ice Wind," "In The Frozen Morning Light" and "Arctic Conditions," it was a pe...

The title of this mix pretty much says it all.  This is a collection of tunes that works well at night. I didn't want the mix to be dark & depressing or dark and scary, just something that feels more at home at night.  It's sort of the opposite of the Sunday morning mixes.  Although a few tunes could go either way. I didn't start out making a "night" mix, it just sort of happened on it's own after...

I love dubby ambient.  I think this is my third dub mix this year.  I'm sure I'll grow tired of this style of music but for now I'm soaking it in.  It was snowing while I made this mix & the music just seemed to fit the winter mood.  Hence the name "A Winter's Dub." Many of the tracks in this mix came from Bandcamp.  As a matter of fact, all the links in the tracklist are to Bandcamp pages.  I lov...

  I know this is not the best time of year for sitting out side and stargazing.  At least not here in Wisconsin.  But I haven't done a stargazing mix in a long time so i thought I'd throw this out there. The piece that got me started on this mix isn't an actual song.  It's NASA's Voyager spacecraft recording the sound of interstellar space.  Voyager's plasma wave instrument detected the vibrations...

About a year ago I did a mix of my favorite ambient artists of all time.  I have been meaning to do a mix of my favorite ambient albums of all time ever since.  And now here it is. I did not go back and look at my favorite artist list.  I sorted through my ambient collection and came up with my fav albums.  Then I compared the two lists and not surprisingly they are almost identical.  Basically I...

As I have said many times before on this blog, a new mix is very often born when a track or two inspires me to create something new.  In this case it was the new album by Esmerine called " Dalmak ." The group recorded the new tracks in Instanbul and the whole album definitely has the texture and feel that one would associate with Turkish music.  The Constellation Records website describes it perfe...

 found a cool clip on YouTube from the Beatles Abbey Road album.  It is the 16 minute medley that closes the album but it's only the vocals.  It's fascinating to listen to familiar vocals in a new way.  Here's a link to the YouTube clip...  Abbey Road vocals . The vocals for "The Sun King" caught my attention and I thought they'd make a nice start to a new Sunday morning mix.  I couldn't resist me...

I happened to come across a new tune from Moritz Von Oswald Trio.  The song, Blue Dub , has this great, slow, sparse dub thing going on that I love.  I knew as soon as I heard it that I'd have to make a new mix of dub related tunes. So, "dub transmissions" is, duh, is mix of dub tunes.  I've done them before & this one is similar to the others.  I think the previous ones have had parts that are a...

Sometime around 2001 I discovered the album  Tides by Arovane .  I'm not sure if it qualifies as "post-digital" or "blip hop" or "micro" music but it was through that album that I began a brief love affair with the style of music known as "glitch." I have always loved electronic & ambient music but at the end of the 1990s I had lost interest in berlin style electronics and mostly listened to strai...

This mix is completely different from anything that I've posted here.  It's not ambient, or electronic or Sunday morning jazz.  This is music for motion. This is a mix I made last summer to listen to while biking.  I liked it so much that I added some new tunes this year and made it longer.  All of the songs have a propulsive, forward-moving feel to them.  There are some oddball choices in there b...

At the suggestion of a listener I set out to do a mix of ambient covers.  Not so easy. But I did find a bunch of Brian Eno cover tunes.  Some I was familiar with, Bang on a Can & Sakamoto, but many of the others were new discoveries made by cruising the web.  The mix starts with probably the most covered Eno tune - An Ending (Ascent), from Apollo.  The cover of that song comes from a new album by ...

I usually keep different folders of music for different types of mixes.  I have a "sea" folder.  And one called "dub & stuff."  Another is "piano."  And of course several "Sunday morning" folders as well. The folder for this mix was called "just plain old good ambient."  And that's a pretty darn good description of this mix.  There's no special theme or concept other than the fact that these cuts...