The word "ambient" literally means "encompassing"; it etymology derives from the Latin for "going around." But one of the genres most captivating strains might better be described as going into the mist, the water or even the earth. This strain emphasizes the grain of sound, the rumble of resistance, the thingliness of the recorded medium itself. This school of thought is best exemplified by William Basinski, whose album Disintegration Loops famously captured the sound of years-old piano sketches being played back on crumbling magnetic tape; it also comprises the full-bore intensity of artists like Ben Frost, Tim Hecker, and Fennesz, who whip up shoegaze-grade distortion and then grind it down to dust.

Brian Eno gave ambient music its name; he also gave the genre its definitive soundbite when he imagined a style "as ignorable as it is interesting." And with a remarkable run of albums beginning in the mid 1970s, he laid the groundwork for ambient at its most all-encompassing. Many of those albums were his own, whether solo or in collaboration: Ambient 1: Music for Airports, a limpid snapshot of generative processes at work, is the ur-text, and is exactly as described: Its less something you pay attention to than a tool for subtly charging the air around you. On Apollo, Daniel Lanois pedal-steel guitar is the filament connecting earthy Americana with Enos vaporous space music. And in his position as label-head (of the short-lived Obscure Records) and curator (of Editions EGs Ambient series), he expanded ambient musics purview with work from Harold Budd, Laraaji, and the Penguin Café Orchestra.

At the heart of all ambient music lies the drone: a single tone, or cluster of tones, that stretches on into infinity, buzzing and shimmering, without end. That coruscating beam was the organizing principle of La Monte Young, John Cale, Tony Conrad, et al in the Theatre of Eternal Music, and has traveled through the work of minimalists like Phill Niblock, Rhys Chatham, and Pauline Oliveros to arrive undisturbed and unadulterated in latter-day drone artists like Éliane Radigue, Eleh, and Sarah Davachi. Drones can be harsh or soft, deceptively static or wildly dynamic; they can be placed in service to more complex sounds, as in the case of the ambient dub act Seefeels spell-binding "Utreat," or they can be the main attraction, as the Swedish composer Folke Rabes "Was??" proves over the course of 26 mind-expanding minutes.

Its impossible to imagine ambient music developing as it did without the influence of krautrock. In fact, its worth remembering that although Brian Enos Ambient 1: Music for Airports was immediately preceded by an extended period in Germany, producing Low and "Heroes" for David Bowie and recording 1977s Cluster & Eno with krautrock heavies Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius. Deconstructing western pop down to its most psychedelic gestural properties, German musicians had already struck upon ambient musics defining characteristics, fashioning a sound as ephemeral as vapor. The "Berlin school," meanwhile-a loose assemblage that included Tangerine Dreams Edgar Froese and onetime TG member Klaus Schulze-transformed progressive-rock bombast into increasingly electronic and ethereal shapes, pioneering the glistening timbres and tumbling arpeggios still fashionable in ambient music decades later.

If it was Brian Eno that first gave shape to the idea of ambient music, it was rave culture that gave it wings. While the bass bins of the main stage thundered away, denizens of the chill-out room floated away on a beatless bed of synths and samples. Early Warp compilations like Artificial Intelligence reimagined electronic music for home listening, and Aphex Twins ethereal Selected Ambient Works Volume II soon set the gold standard for late-night soundtracks for insomniacs. Around the same time, Berlins Basic Channel / Chain Reaction crew was applying dub alchemy to techno, rendering it as smooth as a chrome-plated pulse, while Wolfgang Voigts GAS project, along with the Kompakt labels Pop Ambient series, traded minimalist rigor for lush, liquid atmospheres bursting with color.

Contemporary ambient music begins with Brian Eno, who laid claim to the term with 1978s Ambient 1: Music for Airports. But the idea stretches back a century, to Erik Saties idea of "furniture music." And its roots sink deep into electronic musics mid-century origins, as the advent of oscillators and then synthesizers allowed artists to sculpt sound in ways never before imagined. You can hear ambients early stirrings in Daphne Orams exploratory work for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, in which squealing circuits trace the limits of comprehension; you can hear the sound taking shape in the hypnotic repetitions of Steve Reichs earliest experiments with tape. Groundbreaking synth studies from Suzanne Ciani, Beatriz Ferreyra, and Laurie Spiegel expand upon the otherworldly atmospheres that will become so central to the form. And at the intersection of new music, disco, and post-punk DIY, Arthur Russells World of Echo imagined yet another form of proto-ambient music by turning pop songs diffuse as clouds.

Dark ambient trails ambient music like a shadow. Leaden, loamy, emotionally numb, it might be the ultimate know-it-when-you-hear-it music. Dark ambients roots are in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as industrial musicians began experimenting with glowering, beatless drones, and it flowered in the early 1990s, as Scorn, Main, Lull, Final, and other similarly sternly named artists collectively arrived upon an echo-laden sound that came to be called "isolationism." Pete Namlook and Klaus Schulzes The Dark Side of the Moog formed a bridge between the space music of the Berlin school and the bleak psychedelia of the 1990s, while Lustmord, Robert Rich, and Steve Roach have translated dark ambients charcoal drama to more expressive ends.

New age, long derided as so much crystals-and-incense mumbo-jumbo, has seen its reputation improve in recent years. Partly, thats thanks to compilations like Light in the Attics I Am the Center: Private Issue New Age Music in America 1950-1990 and Soul Jazzs Space, Energy & Light: Experimental Electronic and Acoustic Soundscapes 1961-88. Both served to remind listeners that some new age was pretty awesome, even if it did have titles like "Dolphin Dream" or "The Third Eye of Atlantis." Theres considerable overlap between the new age movement and the early years of ambient music. The pioneering synthesizer musician Suzanne Ciani dipped into new age on albums like 1982s Seven Waves. Ambient and new Age pioneer Laraaji ended up recording for Brian Enos Ambient series after Eno heard him playing new age music in Washington Square Park. And today, pioneering new age work is being folded back into the electronic music canon: Consider the case of Pauline Anna Strom, whose ethereal, drifting synthesizer music-recorded at home in the 1980s-was recently reissued by New York experimental powerhouse RVNG Intl.

In the 2000s, a number of artists on the noise scene gradually swapped ear-scouring feedback for more dulcet synths and arpeggios rooted in the Berlin school of the 1970s. Chief among them were Emeralds, whose dozens of cassette and CDR releases, and subsequent spin-off projects such as Steve Hauschildt, Mark McGuire Imaginary Softwoods, Outer Space, Mist, et al (not to mention scores of releases put out by John Elliotts Spectrum Spools label), generated a prolific cottage industry in psychedelic burble and shimmer. At the same time, Oneohtrix Point Never and other artists tagged as "vaporwave" were channeling yesterdays VHS fantasies into a retro-futurist uncanny valley, where Windows 95 startup chimes served as doorways to new dimensions of perception.

Electronic music is in a funny place right now. It’s as heterogeneous as it’s ever been—a global patchwork of sounds divided by aesthetic, ideology, geography, and even tempo. (See Copenhagen’s so-called “fast techno” scene, whose breakneck energy was best represented by Kulør 001, the inaugural compilation from Courtesy’s Kulør label.) After a long, somewhat uncomfortable stretch in the spotlight, for the better part of the decade, electronic music has largely faded from mainstream view—when was the last time you heard anything about “EDM”? But in that absence of anything resembling a crossover consensus, all manner of ideas have managed to bubble up.Take Slikback. A year ago, nobody in the Northern Hemisphere had heard of the Kenyan producer. Precious few in the Southern, for that matter; he’s only been making music since 2016 or so. But he ended up earning rave reviews for the three sets he played at Kampala, Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Festival, Eastern Africa’s hub for cutting-edge dance music, and a month or so later, his slot at Krakow’s Unsound turned into another hat trick. The very fact that we can speak of a kind of festival network connecting audiences in Eastern Africa and Eastern Europe shows how the landscape has changed in recent years, with artists like Slikback and his sui generis bass music changing the way we think about global undergrounds. His late-2018 remix for Italy’s dancehall-inspired STILL, part of Berlin’s restless PAN crew, further confirmed the Kenyan producer’s arrival.Speaking of bass music, that amorphous category remained the locus of much of electronic music’s vanguard energy, whether that meant Jlin’s continuing mutations in post-footwork, Demdike Stare’s gravelly breakbeat workouts, or the broken rhythms of artists like Bruce, SMX, Pangaea, Parris, and Upsammy. (Undisputed bass anthem of the year: Peder Mannerfelt and Sissel Wincent’s “Sissel & Bass.”) The term “bass music” barely even means anything anymore, at least not anything terribly specific; mainly it just signifies a heavy low end and a certain degree of lurch. But in an era when techno gets drawn ever more narrowly, and house music is often an exercise in retro fealty, the radical openness of bass music was a boon.That’s not to say house and techno didn’t produce great music, even if they rarely sounded essentially new. Even dance music’s nostalgia couldn’t settle on a single reference point, ranging from Lone’s early-’90s ambient-techno reveries to Helena Hauff’s EBM brutalism to the early-’00s minimal revivalism of Huerco S.’ Loidis project. House originator Mr. Fingers put out an album that proved why the genre remains dance music’s gold standard; Octo Octa and Eris Drew honed in on the kinds of ecstatic moods and grooves that feel simply timeless.And while most of the most productive action remained rooted in the underground, that’s not to say that pop crossover was impossible. SOPHIE made one of the year’s most radical record by linking pop pleasures to the most in-your-face experimentalism. Marie Davidson found a wealth of new fans by infusing spiky acid-house revivalism with sly, feminist spoken-word vocals. And Peggy Gou and DJ Koze yielded two of the year’s most universal hits—the kind of tunes that will be filling dancefloors from now ‘til kingdom come—by zeroing in on perfect hooks and a lightness of spirit that was more than welcome in a year as heavy as this one. In a year where it became harder and harder to agree on just about anything, pretty much everyone could find solace in tunes like “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)” and “Pick Up.”