It was a stonking year for ambient music, so it's no huge surprise that I'd forgotten The Orb had an album this year. Their 15th long-player No Sounds Are Out Of Bounds (Cooking Vinyl) was a mixed affair, but Pillow Fight @ Shag Mountain had Jah Wobble on bass and saw them at their Blue Room best. Meanwhile, just missing out on a top 20 place was Pariah, who swapped muscular bass music for swirling ambience on Here From Where We Are (Houndstooth) – all twinkling with hope and dignity.
Laurel Halo's Raw Silk Uncut Wood (Latency) boiled down her work to simplistic melodies rolled across a shallow mist of textures, while there was true serenity to be found in Khotin’s Beautiful You (self-released), its pastoral simplicity an ambient highlight of 2018. And there was more than a little twinkle in the, er, album eye of H Takahashi's Low Power (White Paddy Mountain).
Those people that sniff at modern music saying “that’s just noise” clearly haven’t heard Metasplice’s Mirvariates (The Trilogy Tapes), the duo really giving us a lot of different noises. Dronist Tim Hecker employed a Japanese gagaku ensemble for Konoyo (Kranky), not that you’d recognise them when reduced to this level of shredded brokenness. And Ilpo Väisänen, under his moniker as I-LP-ON, paid tribute to his musical partner Mika Vainio on the minimal and statically charged ÄÄNET (Editions Mego): he took sound snippets from an old world tour with Mika and turned them into something remarkable.
Scroll all of the best 2018 electronic albums by clicking here.
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