TWENTY YEARS! – Ambientblog

If you check the oldest posts on this blog, you’ll find that they were posted on October, 21, 2005.
So hey… it’s the 20th anniversary of Ambientblog today!!
A good moment to look back on the past 20 years – ánd for a fitting celebration gift!

The start – a beginning of a new hobby

A bit more serious

Things got more serious in 2009. Until then, I was involved in a few Dutch national radio shows involving electronic and experimental music. The infamous Supplement program regularly featured my ambient mixes (3 or 4 hours, uninterrupted). Later, there was the NPS Folio show. I’m still proud of my contributions to this show, which can still be enjoyed on this Mixcloud archive. The other editions were produced by Arno Peeters but aren’t archived.
In 2009, the broadcast organisation decided to end all experimental and electronic shows and focus on Soul and Jazz. That was the end of my radio contributions to NPS/VPRO.
The last edition was fittingly called The End Of Trying: a compilation of music by Dakota Suite. It is still available to listen here.

It was also that time I decided to put more energy into the weblog. I changed the name to Ambientblog, and asked Ingmar Hugen to design the new logo image. The purple ‘speaker-flower’ is already 16 years old now and I still have no desire to change it!
From then – the post count grew to an average of around 85 in a year … a quiet but relatively steady pace of 3 ‘recommendations’ every two weeks.

AMBIENTBLOG MIXES AND DREAMSCENES

In addition to the blogposts, I also published the mixes that were previously broadcast on the radio, and continued to create new ones. A characteristic feature of these ‘ambientblog mixes’ is that they consist of many layered fragments, with hardly any complete tracks. They also often include music from outside the ambient music genre.
These ‘collages’ are not intended to be ‘ignorable’ (like in the classic definition of ambient music) or to sleep to, they are created for active listening. I am still very fascinated by the way the fragments work in a different context and in relation to each other. Currently there are 88 of these mixes still downloadable from this site (quite some of them also in a surround version).

In 2014, I introduced DreamScenes as a monthly mix series. These mixes are different from the Ambientblog mixes: here, full tracks are featured instead of short fragments, they are nót layered (apart from the transitions between the tracks). DreamScenes, one could say, is more ‘radio-friendly’. Since mid-2017, the DreamScenes editions are also broadcast on Concertzender Nederland on every second sunday of the month.

Also in 2014, the site was converted from Pivotx to WordPress (which was quite a job and would not have succeeded without the help of Edu Hackenitz). The underlying theme and layout have changed a bit over time, but in fact, the basics of this site haven’t really changed much.

WHY STILL A WEBLOG?

Currently, it’s a bit of a weird time for weblogs like this. The internet has changed, people have changed, social media came along (along with their devastating impact on society), and the way people enjoy and find their music has changed. I could name a few reasons to quit blogging – but in fact, that thought has never crossed my mind. I still hope that these recommendations may help people find music that they otherwise would not easily have found.

I’m grateful for all the music that I receive every week, and sometimes feel guilty that most of that music is NOT published here or featured in DreamScenes. There are many (MANY) albums that I enjoy listening to, but still have to pass. There’s simply too much to cover it all.

CELEBRATION GIFTS

In 2015, I celebrated the 10th anniversary with the release of a credit card USB with unique and previously unreleased tracks by many artists who were previously featured on Ambientblog. The digital version of that release, with the special mix ánd the original tracks, is still available from Bandcamp.
Earlier this year, another credit card release celebrated the fist 10 years (120 editions) of DreamScenes.

I didn’t want to do something similar again, so I decided to celebrate this 20th anniversary with a few simple gifts:

• The digital download of Rope To The Sky (the 10th anniversary collection from 2010) will be ‘pay what you want’ from now on. So grab it if you don’t already have (and perhaps consider a small donation?).
• Below is a free download of the 4 hour Supplement mix from 2000, which is previously unpublished on Ambientblog. This mix was broadcast uninterrupted on Dutch National VPRO Radio in the program with the same name. It was the first in the series of mixes that would follow, but it was not published here on Ambientblog, until now.
• Another free download: a previously unpublished mix that I dug up from the vaults, called Sphaerophon. I made this mix in 1995 (30 years ago!) but never before published it.

Obviously there’s no new music involved: these mixes represent the music from around 1995, 2000, and 2010. But they also demonstrate that atmospheric ambient music can have a timeless quality (at least to me).
I hope that’s true for you, too.
Thanks for visiting Ambientblog (and for reading this far)

Supplement Mix (2000)

Sphaerophon Mix (1995)

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