11's: What to Listen to When You Don't Feel Like Listening
Soundscapes for the overstimulated; ambient for everybody
It’s 9:00 pm on a Friday, and the Lower East Side is buzzing.
I slide through a circle of girls smoking very thin cigarettes just outside Funny Bar, and swing open the frosted glass door. The front corridor is packed, but a swift weave with a few “excuse me’s” lands me in the back room. My friends are huddled around a long 8-top, directly in the center of the dining room. It’s my friend Emma’s birthday, one of the best reasons to get a crew together.
Funny Bar is a captivating place. Everyone under their roof seems to be cosplaying as the most artistic, avant-garde, quirky-but-cute versions of themselves. I’m wearing an unstructured blazer, a white tee, and black selvedge denim jeans — I don’t feel underdressed, but I do feel too normal.
Each table in the dining room is covered with a blank, white paper tablecloth — a few scattered crayons and briny-looking martinis in coupe glasses sit atop.
I overhear someone refer to the bar as “chic,” which is not the most offensive use of the adjective, but also not one I necessarily agree with. The bar slash lounge slash restaurant is certainly cool, I’d even give it sexy — glass brick, postmodern details, a sunken seating area, dimly lit, narrow walkways meant for brushing elbows. But it leans gritty, silly, and loose more than it exudes elegance or sophistication. We’re on Essex St, after all.
The main draw of Funny Bar is, counterintuitively, not laughter — it’s live jazz music that plays at a conversation-inhibiting volume. But see, it’s not the jazz itself that appeals, but rather the presence of jazz as a tasteful frill to a night out downtown. People don’t say “Let’s go listen to jazz at Funny Bar,” they say “Let’s go to Funny Bar — they have jazz.”
An ice cream sundae emerges from the kitchen, adorned by a single candle, and we break into a spirited rendition of “Happy Birthday.” As we carry the tune, I can’t help but notice the underlying competition of volume. The instrumentation, acoustically loud enough to blanket the mid-sized room, was further amplified by sleek wooden speakers. The table of girls next to us had a lot of drama to catch up on. Every singular voice in the room seemed aware of the surrounding loudness and made itself even louder to compensate.
The musicians play harder. The girls’ week-in-review ascends from a yap to a feverish screech. Every third word seems to be “WHAT?” The server cups his hand and motions toward his ear, indicating he can’t hear my order of a Negroni from just the other end of the table. Our Happy Birthday singing loses all pitch in favor of pure volume. If Funny Bar had a jumbotron with a big decibel meter telling you to “Get Loud,” the meter hand is surely pushing into the red.
And in this moment, surrounded by volume without cohesion, everyone screaming to be heard — I realized why I’ve been enjoying ambient music so much lately.
Because it doesn’t compete — it complements.
There’s a state of being that I often exist in that demands more than silence, but less than full-blown, energetic music. There are moments — days, even — when music feels like too much stimulus. Where lyrics are distracting, and even my favorite albums ask for more attention than I have to give. It’s a companion that I seek, more than anything — music that floats, flutters, and settles softly into the corners of a room.
Plane rides, the thirty minutes before bed, the first hour after waking, deep focus sessions, washing dishes, lying in the park watching the sky, subway trips, walks through the city, sometimes even workouts. These are all situations where I find myself turning to droney, spacey, ambient sounds.
Ambient is a fairly vague and open-ended genre of music — there’s a wide range of sounds and feelings within it. But generally, it’s music that’s mellow, instrumental, abstract, and even a bit mysterious. The opposite of hype music. Brian Eno, the godfather of ambient, has a quote about the goal of his productions: “It must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
For me, ambient music sounds like listening to art. I know all music is art, but ambient especially feels like immersing yourself in someone else’s deep inner workings.
The soundscapes of ambient music complement the world around me and gently alter how I perceive it. It enhances the emotion of the mundane. It feels like a journey through the woods more than a lap around an F1 track. It swirls like wind, but never blows you off course.
For an active, analytical listener like myself, ambient music solves a specific problem: it offers richness — texture, atmosphere, slow harmonic movement — that rewards close attention but never demands it.
My personal exploration of ambient music has been profoundly rewarding. It feels like I’ve added a tool to my arsenal that grounds me and clarifies even my most complex thoughts. Functionally, it’s less like music and more like a second consciousness running alongside me.
If you’ve felt similarly to me lately — overstimulated, yet not wanting to be fully left in silence — I’d encourage you to give these records (my personal favorites) a shot.
Despite sounding quite different, they have a throughline: It’s music to exist to. To focus on or ignore. It’s what to listen to when you don’t feel like listening.
11’s: What to Listen to When You Don’t Feel Like Listening
01] Nala Sinephro — Space 1.8
Best for: Deep creative thinking; coming up with Substack prompts
The jazziest album on the list. Nala Sinephro brings together waves of live instrumentation and layers it with modular synths and harp cascades. It builds, weaves, and has bursts of energy. Full of life, color, and nice vibrations. It’s funky and fun, and pushes me outside my conventional box of thinking.
02] Various Artists — Virtual Dreams II - Ambient Explorations In The House & Techno Age
Best for: Coming down after a night out; eating something spicy; organizing your junk drawer
A rec from the good people at Choza in Mexico City. This collection of forgotten Japanese ambient tracks feels so cohesive despite being disparate. Existential, hypnotic, and a little wobbly, this record gets the most airtime later in the evening for me.
[03/04/05] Floating Points — Crush, Promises, Elaeina
Best for: Café hopping on a Saturday afternoon; contemplating; sitting in a Snow Peak chair around a campfire
Floating Points is the artist I’m most captivated by right now. His live sets are masterful and journeylike (experiencing his Sunflower Sound System is at the top of my musical wish list). Naturally, for an artist so talented, his recorded albums are beautifully artistic, boundary-pushing, and timeless. I’ve listed three of his five albums because I listen to them substantially more than the other two.
Crush is the most experimental, synthy, and loopy of the three, which lands in a surprisingly meditative way (it’s also my all-time favorite album artwork). Promises is a magnificent orchestral-ambient collaboration featuring the late, great Pharoah Sanders on saxophone — it feels like moving through a daydream. Elaeina was the album that started the Floating Points project, and still holds up as an intimate, ethereal record 10 years later. All stellar in their own ways, showcasing the full spectrum of the Floating Points sound.
06] Brian Eno — Thursday Afternoon
Best for: Thursday afternoon (in September, with overcast skies and a slight breeze); drinking soba cha
A recommendation from my friend Rowan Spencer, who writes Time Signature. I was familiar with Eno’s Ambient 1: Music For Airports, but he turned me onto this hour-long single composition, which has become one of my favorite things to listen to. It’s a gentle piano progression that builds to a sunny, lively climax that never fails to raise my spirits and spark a bit of creativity.
07] Chihei Hatakeyama — Late Spring
Best for: Any sort of to and from — plane, train, automobile
Minimal, grounding, rooted in nature. Chihei Hatakeyama’s springtime ode is a bit melancholic, a touch understated. It’s sonically rich in a way that envelops me and allows me to drift into a soft, steady state of mind.
08] Jon Hopkins — Music For Psychedelic Therapy
Best for: Swiftly calming the nervous system; looking at the stars
My undisputed goat ambient album. I’ve listened hundreds of times and can never get enough. “Tayos Caves, Ecuador i-iii” puts me under a serious spell with the mix of field recordings and droney spacey sounds. Ambient is a hard genre to use the phrase “best,” but this record and its emotive qualities create a sound that I really, deeply connect with the most. Perfect in all situations.
09] Aphex Twin — Selected Ambient Works 85-92
Best for: A late-night drive; watching the ocean’s waves roll in
The most well-known album on the list, for good reason. Richard James’ timeless creation is more rhythmic than many albums on this list, with a sound that can’t be pinned down, fluctuating between warmth and cold, light and darkness. Every song on the record has a transportive quality and really takes me to the same deeply specific place across listens.
10] Four Tet — Three +
Best for: Cleaning out your closet; drinking ginger ale on an airplane
A steady yet adventurous instrumental jam from one of electronic music’s greats. Three is a bit underappreciated in the Four Tet discography, but it’s comforting, listen-to-able in a way that’s a great entry point for the ambient curious. Four Tet has many bangers, but you won’t find them on this record.
11] Jon Hopkins — Quiet (Spotify playlist)
Best for: Winding down. Way, way down
The softest, slowest of the entrants here. Jon Hopkins’ Quiet Spotify playlist pulls together some of the best, mellow ambient tracks that are perfect for a tender, mellow state of relaxation. It’s often shuffled with a 30-minute sleep timer right before I head to bed.
If you’re a fan of ambient music, I’d love to hear from you. Drop an album rec or share your favorite situation to listen to ambient. Turn me onto something new.
And for all these albums on one master playlist, follow the link to my Spotify here.
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