What Is Ambient House Music?

Ambient house music is a mix between house music and ambient music. Described as dreamy, chill out and quiet music, tracks in the ambient house music genre typically feature four-on-the-floor beats, synth pads, and vocal samples integrated in an atmospheric style. Ambient house music tracks generally lack a diatonic centre and feature much atonality along with synthesized chords.

When Did Ambient House Music Begin?

Brian Eno is said to be the pioneer of ambient music, which he describes on the liner notes of his album "Music for Airports" as 'Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting'.

The ambient house music movement was founded mainly by The Orb members Alex Patterson and Jimmy Cauty, whose many influences included Steve Reich, Brian Eno, reggae music, and 1970s psychedelic rock, including Pink Floyd.

Ambient House Music made a brief appearance in the chill-out rooms of London clubs in the late 1980s when house music was born. Calming, soothing tracks such as the Orb's 'Little Fluffy Clouds', the Grid's 'Floatation' and Innocence's 'Natural Thing' were designed to encourage the rave generation to have a rest in a 'chill out' room, rather than dance.

The Progress of Ambient House Music

As these chill out rooms became more popular Patterson and Cauty jointly released in 1989 what many believe to be the first ever ambient house music for clubbers. It bore the strange title of 'A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre of the Ultraworld'. Soon after the album's release Patterson and Cauty went their separate ways; Cauty teaming up with Bill Drummond to form KLF and Patterson continuing to write under the name of The Orb and DJ in the chill out rooms.

Out of Patterson and Cauty's sessions at Trancentral studio, came Cauty and Bill Drummond's KLF album Chill Out (which featured no credit to Patterson). As possibly the first ambient house music album, it is described by The Grove Dictionary of Music as 'a 1980s pop culture version of musique concrète'. After splitting from The Orb, Cauty finished work on his own album Space, and Paterson's Orb went on to create the single 'Little Fluffy Clouds' - both important works of ambient house music.

In 1991, The Orb released the album The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, featuring both of their previous singles. Combining Moog synthesizers with religious chorales and audio clips of the Apollo 11 rocket launch, The Orb popularised the 'spacy' sound of ambient house music.

While The KLF retired in 1992, The Orb released their most successful ambient house music single 'Blue Room', which reached Number 8 on the UK singles chart. At 40 minutes, it was the longest single to reach the UK charts. Its edited form appeared on The Orb album U.F.Orb later that year. U.F.Orb brought in dub influences as well into ambient house music. In the years after the release of their live album, Live 93, The Orb largely abandoned the ambient house music sound in favor of more 'metallic' music.

The Future of Ambient House Music

In 1992 ambient house music was adopted by different artists who each put their own twist on it, thus diversifying it into subgenres. These included ambient dub, (ambient music with a bass), conventional (ambient with a 4/4 backbeat), beatless (no backbeat but following the same repetition as dance music) and soundscape (essentially pop music with a slow, laid-back beat).

By 1995 ambient house music was everywhere. Larger record companies saturated the market with countless ambient compilations and artists who had previously ignored the genre began to record the music hoping to 'make a quick buck'.

Eventually however, ambient house music became a victim of its own success. The general public became tired of the sound, and, to the joy of many a clubber, it was no longer the new fashion and returned to only being played where it had originated from - the chill out rooms.

In the year 2000 DJs in Ibiza's Cafe Del Mar began to tailor music to suit the beautiful sunsets by mixing Jazz, Classical, Hispanic and New Age together to produce laid back beats for clubbers to once again chill out to. Re-packaged and re-labelled chill out music, it enjoyed renewed interest and became a genre in its own right. However, while chill out certainly has its roots deeply embedded in ambient house music they have, over time, become two very different genres.

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