Items21The creator’s order
  1. 1The Dreaming (1982)The Dreaming (1982)Released Jan 1, 1982The first album Kate Bush produced entirely on her own, and the one where the Fairlight sampler lets her stitch voices, cries and drones into collages that feel like a dream changing rooms mid-scene. Accents slip, choruses lurch and the closing Get Out of My House, drawn from Stephen King's The…0
  2. 2Ambient 4: On Land (1982)Ambient 4: On Land (1982)Released Jan 1, 1982The last of Brian Eno's Ambient series trades the calm of Music for Airports for half-remembered places, built from tape, struck chains and recordings of rooks, frogs and insects. Eno called it a disturbed landscape, and that is exactly the feeling: a pastoral surface with something low rumbling…0
  3. 3Floating Into the Night (1989)Floating Into the Night (1989)Released Jan 1, 1989Angelo Badalamenti's music, David Lynch's lyrics and Julee Cruise's weightless voice: this is the sound of Twin Peaks before and beyond the show, with Falling supplying the series' theme in instrumental form. Reverb-soaked guitar and slow synth pads hang like fog in a roadhouse long after closing…0
  4. 4Selected Ambient Works, Volume II (1994)Selected Ambient Works, Volume II (1994)Released Jan 1, 1994Richard D. James credited this album to his lucid dreaming, and most of its tracks were released untitled, which suits music that feels like rooms nobody can name. Long, hazy synth tones drift over muffled pulses; some pieces are lullabies, others sound like machinery humming in the dark next…0
  5. 5Tilt (1995)Tilt (1995)Released Jan 1, 1995Scott Walker's first studio album in eleven years is the hardest listen on this list and one of the most vivid. Cryptic, fragmentary lyrics sit over industrial clangs, organ and the strings of the Sinfonia of London, so each song moves like a nightmare that keeps changing scenery without…0
  6. 6Zauberberg (1998)Zauberberg (1998)Released Jan 1, 1998Wolfgang Voigt's Gas records turn techno into forest weather, and this one, named after Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, is generally considered the darkest and most dissonant of them. A distant kick drum thuds under smeared loops that sound like an orchestra heard through fog and pine trees,…0
  7. 7Musick to Play in the Dark, Volume 1 (1999)Musick to Play in the Dark, Volume 1 (1999)Released Jan 1, 1999Coil called this phase moon musick, and the album sounds like a nocturnal ritual with the lights off: droning organ, vocoded voices, crackles and watery thumps, with Jhonn Balance's murmured vocals drifting in and out. Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East is the centerpiece, slow and…0
  8. 8Kid A (2000)Kid A (2000)Released Jan 1, 2000Thom Yorke built abstract lyrics by cutting up phrases and assembling them at random, and many of his vocals were warped with effects, so words float free of meaning the way speech does in a dream. Everything in Its Right Place opens on a chopped, looping voice; elsewhere Jonny Greenwood's ondes…0
  9. 9Sunset Mission (2000)Sunset Mission (2000)Released Jan 1, 2000Bohren & der Club of Gore play jazz so slowly that it feels like a film noir paused between frames. This was their first album with saxophonist Christoph Clöser, whose long, smoky lines drift over sparse drums, soft keys and a bass that seems to step out of the dark. Picture an empty hotel bar…0
  10. 10Geogaddi (2002)Geogaddi (2002)Released Jan 1, 2002Boards of Canada's second album is a darker shade of their faded-home-movie sound, threaded with esoteric references, half-heard voices and samples tuned just off true. The standard edition runs 66 minutes and 6 seconds, a fitting detail for a record that sounds like a children's nature film…0