Amateur Hour (Ambient) - No Cover

Various technologies have made it possible for both committed and involuntary amateurs to build up formidable bodies of work - much of it downloadable, all for free!! But I firmly believe that everyone needs a little amateurism in their musical lives.


Glasslung is one of many solo electro-ambient projects using the internet as their private digital distribution system - for free. Go to his blog for the whole discography to download.


Drown Slow by briansopher

I had started to post about this over a year ago, having found it on some Elder Scrolls forum. Then I kind of forgot about it, but he's just continued turning out the albums and EP's. I grabbed the most recent one, Great White Walls (March 2011), and it's better than I remembered! He calls it "ambient neoclassical droneshit," and it's kind of a midpoint between Leyland Kirby's synth tunes and his more environmental stuff as The Caretaker. I'd call it "cavernous sorrows in the spectral train station." Or something...

You can also listen to some tracks over at SoundCloud or on MySpace. Same dude previously did work as Fotled, with several releases here.




Hunting&Gathering is from Romania - with several free releases to stream or download at BandCamp, with liner notes! These drones are more acoustic guitar-based, with some ambient noises. Pretty cool stuff from everything I've checked out so far. Might as well start with the original demo, Journey to Balmora (2010). Although I discovered the artist at a different, non-Elder Scrolls forum, this one was inspired by probably my single favorite video-game ever.

...enjoy these songs, which are all about or inspired by The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, a video game I furiously loved. This first demo is all about the first portion of the game, where you arrive in the small port town of Seyda Neen and proceed to explore its surroundings, the most notable of which are Seyda Neen itself and its lighthouse, the Samarys Ancestral Tomb (a nice little crypt...

Hilarious!!



And here's the one that prompted reviving the old "Some Free Ambients" draft. Recently posting a comment here, Mabatapes wants you to know about PLAENS. So why not?

Check out their SoundCloud page with about 5 long tracks of drifting synth space-drone, available for your downloading pleasure. Or to stream. If I had to pick a favorite title, it would be "Endlessly Drifting Remnants of Transmissions from an Extraterrestrial Headdress Ceremony," but the best music so far is probably this:


PLAENS - SPCZDPLC - SIDE A by MABA Tapes

Most of the tracks sound fairly similar to me... good for background music while reading a sci-fi paperback or something. They have one album-length track up on BandCamp. Name your price, o' course.

(There is no known connection to Bethesda's series of open-world fantasy RPG's, which continues in November!!)



One more, real quickly. Alan Morse Davies is Welsh. This was in the earlier draft, but I don't remember too many details... I love the title It Is Glorious to Make Electricity for Socialism (2010) - downloadable and streaming at The Internet Archive. Lots of other, ongoing stuff stuff available listed here.

Discovered via Disquiet - great resource! Keep up at his blog (which I forgot to do). A little more info At Sea...

Cheers!