Hello, I am still not a native speaker of English and I will never be, so please ignore my misuse of tenses and so forth. That said, welcome to the second edition of "atomic meta thoughts" Today's topic: Ambient music.
 

What's Ambient music anyway?

 I am not one of those hairsplitting dudes who make a difference between "Melodic Death metal" and "Death metal", so I am applying a somewhat broad definition of Ambient. I define Ambient music simply as breezy-fluffy, relaxing music with none or minimal beats and no vocals.
more on Magnus Birgersson later).
 

Gateway-drug: Ambient on internet radio

If you want to get a first impression of Ambient music, I suggest internet radio. I have two recommendations.
 
DroneZone (www.somafm.com)
 
Many of you will know this one, it's probably the biggest strictly-ambient stream out there. All the streams on somafm kick ass, and this one is my personal favorites (along with the wacky Secret Agent stream). They play a lot of stuff from the early-mid 90s, apparently a golden age for Ambient music. They play every track full-length and there is no advertising. Every few hours or so Rusty - the founder of somafm - will ask you to donate some money, and that's it.

Cryosleep (www.bluemars.org)

This is the second pure-Ambient stream and actually the first one I listened too. It's basically DroneZone with a different track selection and it's just as good. The only problem is a inconsistency of the volume levels, some tracks are louder than others. It's a little annoying, but no big deal. No advertising here either.
 

The read deal - artist recommendations

 
Well, normally I would recommend specific albums, but my own collection is simply too small yet to present certain albums as cleary better than others - instead, I will point you to some interesting artists that you might want to check out. Please do me a favor and buy their stuff and don't just fire up eMule or whatever you use. Ambient music is a niche as it is and those guys need all support they can get. Most if this stuff is on Amazon and iTunes (personally I prefer Amazon - no DRM and good quality).
 
Biosphere (Geir Jenssen)
 
Well, this is the one case I am going to mention a specific album, because his "Substrata" is simply mindblowing. It's minimalistic and unique, each track is recognizable (that's quite feat considering Ambient music in general is not very diverse) and the fidelity of the production is incredible, which is probably not surprising since 1997 people still made full use of the frequency range of CDs - unlike today, where the so-called "loudness war" (look it up) ruins everything. Jenssen makes great use of self-recorded sounds and vocals, it's really a joy to listen to his work like "Antennaria".
 
Liquid Mind (Chuck Wild)
 
This is a somewhat difficult case. While the music from Chuck Wild is incredibly soothing and uplifting (it's actually marketed as a soporific), the great problem is diversity. Every track sounds pretty much the same. Ironically, there are "best-of" albums, but frankly you could put any random Liquid Mind track on there. So, why do I recommend it? Because a) this is the most uplifting "sweet" Ambient out there and b) Chuck Wild is a former professional composer, so his work is top-notch technically. Unfortunately he tends so smother the mid-high frequencies a bit with too much underlining bass, but other then that, it's just nice music that is extremely relaxing. Fun fact: On the CD you can find an explicit warning not to listen to it while operating a vehicle. Because, you know, sleeping kinda distracts from driving.
 
Boards Of Canada (Michael Sandison & Marcus Eoin Sandison)
 
Yeah, I am bending the rules for this one. This is not exactly Ambient, this is, well, whatever the hell Boards Of Canada make. They have their own style, so I won't bother trying to squeeze it into a specific genre. It's disturbing and weird, twisted and melancholic and conveys a distinct post nuclear war feeling. They make clever use of reversed samples and they have quite some a range withing their own little genre, from pretty wild stuff "(Gyroscope") over relaxing titles ("Cycling", "Peacock Tail") to really fucked up shit ("Dawn Chorus"). All the while the soundmix is being dirty, grainy and gritty.

Solar Fields (Magnus Birgersson)
 
This is the guy who produced the soundtrack for Mirror's Edge, which in my opinion greatly emphasized the futuristic urban atmosphere of the game. I started to look for more material by Solar Fields , and there is quite a lot of it. Birgerrson released several albums, the latest in Janauary 2009. I bought two of them so far, but I am going to collect them all eventually. If you played the game, you know what you will get. I really like the very lofty and incredibly crispy sound. Birgersson makes great use of the higher frequency band, allowing the tracks to breathe. The result is a very open, spherical soundscape, fully exploiting my stereo setup. You may not realize this at first, but a decent channel separation is essential for good Ambient music, as evidenced here.
 
The Orb (initial members: Jimmy Cauty & Alex Paterson)

They are probably most famous for their crazy, fascinating mess of a track called "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld". Another famous track is "Little Fluffy Clouds". Yes, I know, neither of those is Ambient music in a stricter sense, but still Ambient-ish enough to warrant a recommendation here. Interestingly, several beatlines created by The Orb became sort if iconic over time and were sampled and reused in many other tracks. Therefore "Hey, I know this beat!" is a common reaction while listening to The Orb. As far as early 90s synthesizer-pop goes, they are an authority. Fun fact: Jimmy Cauty was also a part of the legendary project KLF ("9 A. M. Eternal" and so forth).
 

Honorable mentions

Kraftwerk (Ralf Hütter, Henning Schmitz, Fritz Hilpert, Stefan Pfaffe)
 
Well, I am from Germany, so I had to mention Kraftwerk at least once. Their work was very influential in the early stages of electronic music and some of their tracks are 
considered cult classics, not only in Germany. When I first listened to "Autobahn", I was impressed. Considering it was made in 1974 (think about that for a minute), it sounds great. Purely electronically produced, this track goes on for 22 minutes. It's also famous for it's asinine vocals, akin to Dadaism. It's a historic piece of electronic music.
 
Steve Roach
 
You might have heard of a genre called Dark Ambient. Simply put, Steve Roach equals Dark Ambient. His soundscapes are incredibly haunting and brooding and clearly not suited for everyone. Think H. R. Giger in acoustic form. An interesting listening experience to say the least.
 

Personal disappointments

 
Jonn Serrie
 
After hearing some tracks from him on DroneZone, I bought his debut Album from 1987 - it was quite underwhelming. Too basic and far too heavy on the mid/high frequencies. In all honesty, it's glorified elevator music.
 
The Future Sound Of London (Brian Dougans & Garry Cobain)
 
Their "Lifeforms" album which I own contains is a strange mix between Ambient, Synthesizer-Pop and Tribal with no part executed particularly well in my opinion. There is just nothing outstanding about it, it just kinda plays along. Parts of it are downright annoying. Major bummer, especially compared to The Orb.
 

You reached the end …

 
 … of this massive wall-o-text. Thanks for reading. If you are interested and open minded musically, check some of this stuff out, on youtube for instance. It's no party music, that's for sure ;-)
 
 I have been the atomic dumpling.

Hello! First of all, I am not a native speaker of English, so bear with me (get it?) and ignore my misuse of tenses and so forth. That said, welcome to the first edition of "atomic meta thoughts" Today's topic:






















I am going to break this down into two basic questions for a guided reading experience.

1. Why are people actually watching this, even the boring parts?

It's no secret that not everyone likes the ER - in fact, there's number of folks out there who simply can't wrap their head around this concept. And they are perfectly right for several reasons:

What's not so great about the ER

1. It's a fairly old game, and mad Japanese on top of it
2. Two journalists play the crap out of this, while they should be writing reviews and stuff
3. Watching people grind through dungeons is not funny at all
4. It's just weird

Well, these points are all valid. No matter how you look at it, dungeon crawling is inherently a bore. Now, if you can't stand listening to Jeff and Vinny keeping each other motivated while doing this you cannot help but hate this stuff. And why wouldn't you? On the other side, there are quite some reasons to watch this:

What's totally rad about the ER

1. There is a certain satisfaction in watching Jeff and Vinny making progress
2. It was once conceived as a short time joke
   
3. Playing with only one savestate
   
4. Vinny
5. Randomness, both in-game and in the commentary
   

I am going to elaborate on points 2, 4 and 5 down below. Whether you agree with assertion number 1 depends on your own mindset while watching the ER. Think of it as a Quicklook where you simply want Brad to die, just the reverse of that (hurray for wacky analogies). The second point should be clear - many people who played the game quickly dismissed the idea as ludicrous, especially since Jeff and Vinny are playing on the normal difficulty setting, with only one savestate on top of that. Consequently, every single decision is set in stone, which adds a whole new layer of suspense to the ER. Even from a purely technical standpoint, that seems risky. Remember the power outtages (episode 61)? If this single savegame gets corrupted in any way, the ER is finished, just like that. That's about as hardcore as it gets (or mind numbingly stupid, take your pick).

Why are they doing this?

"To themselves", one might add. Well, since we can only speculate about the actual thought process that went into the creation of the ER, it's a fair bet that it wasn't planned as a long term project, despite the title. Yes, it's clearly related to video games, but still: Persona 4, all the way? I just can't imagine Jeff saying "Hell yeah, 100 hours, count me in dowg!". Jeff kinda going along with it is more like it, that would also fit his statements in Episode 50, incidentally one of the ER-highlights. Speaking of episode 50, let's talk Vinny. I have no shame in saying that it's mostly him why I am still watching this daily dose of "WTF". Keep in mind that this guy actually paid a decent amount of money to get the apparently kaput episode 50 repaired - out of his own poket, I assume. That's plain crazy. He really seems to enjoy this game and has genuine fun playing it. He is also really sad when something bad happens (the hilarious Hama-death and the 1EXP-boss come to mind).

But there is also the simple fact that the ER generates a lot of buzz, which is always good for a relatively young and not-so-known website. It's a great vehicle for cross-promotion too, since they can casually talk about other stuff happing on giantbomb and all sorts of random topics. There's just no limit, especially during some tedious dungeon revisiting.

And finally the most important reason, both why they are making it and we are watching it: It completely circumvents the fourth wall. They mock the game, but clearly like it. They mock the audience, but clearly want to entertain us. They mock the Japanese culture, but clearly find it fascinating (watermelons?). And all in good fun. It's that certain self-aware kind of irony that is only possible with projects like this. Granted, Jeff sometimes sounds like he is really starting to get sick of this Persona 4 thing, but that just puts the "Endurance" into "Endurance Run".
----------------------

Alright, that's it for now. I hope you enjoyed my ramblings, whether you hate or love the ongoing Endurance Run. I think I made a lot of points people will agree with, partly because they are all pretty obvious. I have been the atomic dumpling, saying: "Social Link with the fox! This is the best game ever!" (Jeff, episode 36).