One of the distinguishing qualities of ambient music is the way in which it makes us consider the relationship between sound and environment. More so than any other sonic form, it envelops the space that it’s produced and listened in through its patient unfolding. It slowly shapes the environment and creates an affect space that can become imperceptible to the listener, as if natural to the surroundings.

01. Glass

More about: Alva Noto, Ryuichi Sakamoto

The 2011 version of Car Seat Headrest’s Twin Fantasy begins with a variation of the iconic drum phrase from “Be My Baby.” Comprised of just a kick drum and two sticks clicking together, the album’s intro is a modest gesture. But gradually, “My Boy (Twin Fantasy),” the album’s inaugural song, grows more layered, culminating in a cacophony of messy, distorted guitars, clipping-prone drum tracks, and band autocrat Will Toledo’s quadruple-tracked vocals.

More about: Car Seat Headrest

On a clear night — wide-eyed, gin-soaked, fists raised, starry-skied — the streets of towns and small cities take on their own blurry glamour. The shatter of glass after dark is a starting pistol here, spurred on by the sound of sirens and the faint taste of blood in the mouth, sprinting around corners and side streets. In the early years, at least, every Wild Beasts song seemed desperate to synthesize that juvenile adrenaline, crooning about exchanges that were sometimes brawling, sometimes lusty, often both.

More about: Wild Beasts

Intervivos opens with a pause (looking for an angle, a way out from the uninhabitable mindset that is evasion) just long enough for the blasted saxophone pattern that follows to feel like a desperate way out. But it fails, checks itself, and instead lingers (as a pining strain of feedback needles into view after 10-odd seconds of silence) in the elliptical space between voices, hanging in the extension, refusing to leave despite it being a scorched zone, charged with noxious affect and a kind of ambient, unresolved wailing.

More about: Daichi Yoshikawa, Jean-Luc Guionnet