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Afterlife's Top Five Ambient and Downtempo Tracks
Renowned British producer Steve Miller aka. Afterlife presents his top 5 ambient and downtempo picks, inspiring his latest release ‘Wide Awake’ on Reflections 07.
⚫️ Suzanne Ciani & Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – Closed Circuit
“From the 3 track album ‘Sunergy’ this was performed live at Suzanne’s house overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Suzanne playing a buchla modular and Kaitlyn playing the buchla music easel. I like the sound of buchla instruments using additive synthesis and the music easel has a unique way of controlling and changes timbre over time, mine is arriving very soon after a 2 year wait! This track has a classical format taking a theme and developing it over time.”
Check out a short film of the entire live album here.
⚫️ Isao Tomita – Children’s Corner No.4. Snowflakes are Dancing
“Tomita produced this landmark album using a very large modular synthesiser and his classical training to produce the works of Claude Debussy. Debussy and Erik Satie may well be the first musicians to establish ambient music in the early 1900s as the posters of their forthcoming performance encouraged the audience to sit facing each other and have intelligent conversations inspired by the ambient music of the performance and (perhaps jokingly) they stated that if the audience were quiet and stared at the players as they would in a normal concert they may stop playing.”
⚫️ Biosphere – Sendai – 1
“Geir Jenssen’s work was the main inspiration for me starting to work in ambient music where listening becomes a primary activity and focuses the mind body and spirit to pay attention to the sound and become totally involved with the music. I try to follow his example with this aim in mind and I feel that I definitely made this happen when composing ‘Wide Awake’. I was patching in my modular rig when I inadvertently patched the opening plucked string into a slew limiter and it started talking to me, I’m glad I was listening.”
⚫️ Ada Kaleh – Palatul De Clestar
“In my top five tracks of all time, again focused, contemplative, yet great to dance to at a festival. I love the details in the groove and the bass clarinet that floats over the top is magical. It’s a spiritual benchmark for me.”
⚫️ Marconi Union – Sleeper (Biosphere Remix)
“I love the smooth analogue sinewave bass in Geir’s work, the hint of jazzy drums, farway trumpet solos, exquisite production. It takes the original track to a whole new level.”
Written by: Ella Machen
