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brian eno's on land (ambient 4) is personally my fav ambient album of all time.

I think he was beyond his time and his legacy lives on every ambient album that I hear.

Impossible for me to qualify because the choices are mindboggling!

Aside from Eno, I would say my favorite single ambient release is the three CD set A Storm of Drones (Sombient-Asphodel, 1997). There's sooo much great stuff packed into this collection:
Steve Roach
Robert Rich
Robert Normandeau
Francis Dhomont
Alan Lamb
Maryanne Amacher
Jeff Greinke
Stuart Dempster
...and many many more.
While A Storm of Drones was marketed as ambient, monst of the artists weren't strictly ambient. A lot of them were electroacoustic artists you can find on empreintes DIGITALes of Montreal (http://www.electrocd.com).

My favorite label for Ambient music is Hypnos (http://www.hypnos.com), which is run by M. Griffin, an Ambient artist himself.

An absolutely superb Ambient CD I just pulled out of my collection today is Vidna Obmana & Willem Tanke: Variations for Organ, Keyboards and Processors.

sorry to barge in on a thread i had no part in.

i like ( ) quite a lot, much more than any release from sigur ros. but i don't know if i'd call it ambient. it definitely has some heavy ambient influences coursing through it, but ultimately i think there are too many rock/chamber pop elements to classify it as "ambient."

my favorite ambient album (and i'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet) would have to be SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS, VOL. II by none other than mr. richard d. james, aka aphex twin. i realize he isn't necessarily a "pure" ambient artist, as the rest of his work is much more drill'n'bass/idm-oriented, but saw2 is captivating in its haunting subtleties.
i've never been a big namlook fan (though perfect body by namlook and robert görl of d.a.f. is a really fun record), so i don't know much about his work and wouldn't feel appropriate commenting on it.

glad to find a message board with intelligent discussions of electronic music. i look forward to posting more in the future. =)

p.s., sorry about the lack of avatar and signature. give me time, i'm lazy.

Biosphere - Autour de la Lune. i cannot go into detail at the moment.

I've heard that one. You need a pretty good sound system that performs well in the low frequencies to really enjoy that one I think.

good call. It's his most quiet album yet.

Autour de la Lune is a smart choice, it's the closest to an almost silent piece that anybody have gone so far, very subtle. Sound design is top, really great sound overall.

I think it's his first really dark album deep, heavy and metalic. I know I won't admire an album the way admire this one in a while.

aphex twin - selected ambient works volume II

Some top notch ambient albums already mentioned here,but my fave is Eno & Harold Budd's "The Pearl".