i second logreybeam....infact everything on TYPE is amazing.
No-one mentioned 'Helios - Eingya' possibly the greatest chilled out record of all time....
also i'd give a nod to pretty much everything on tri angle records. Not quite ambient but hey i can smoke to that shit for real ! 'balam acab' makes some of the most beautiful stuff i've heard in a long long time,
you ll also find an array of chilled out glitchy electronica at INPUJ.net
and lastly, Yasume - Where we're from the birds sing a different song. This is logreybeam and someone else, cant remember who....
i think i almost wore out my vinyl of that from playing it so much : )

@Jay Tholen: No worries!

Ha, I voted for this under some category for the TCTD awards a few months ago. Fantastic.

This guy is blowing my mind. Thanks dude.

tomita's rendition of grofé's grand canyon suite is a feat of technical and artistic mastery.

/real talk

hell yeah, i have an amazing record of his arrangement of the firebird. very, very, VERY impressive.

You say you like Moog synths and the sound of a Mellotron?

Check out Isao Tomita's work from the 70s and 80s. He did a lot of versions of classical music plus some of his own compositions using a Moog modular, mellotron and other synths.

eg. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B3TwSeo … re=related

My two cents.

going for self-promotion here:

http://chipflip.org/02 is 66 minutes long.
perhaps more rhythms than an ambient-purist would like.

it's all C64 though. but hopefully that doesn't matter.

ambient industrial? id have to suggest Ministry's 'Cannibal Song', love that fucking sax. though that is just one song, and is heavier on the 'industrial' (the album it was on sucks and isnt ambient)...
as for albums id suggest throbbing gristle's 'D.O.A: the third and final report', if you havnt heard it already.

More great suggestions! This truly is an awesome thread. I knew there would be a million other artists I would forget to post, not the least of which is Red Fog who does some crucial drone work! I'll try to post more as I think of them. Keep up the good work people!

stephan mathieu is incredible. i was just listening to radioland the other day and realized that every time i put it on it blows me away.

geotic
pretty much the entire 12k label
-taylor deupree
-christopher willits
-fourcolor
-marcus fischer (he also did an amazing collab with deupree)
-illuha
-the boats
-small color
-pillowdiver
bvdub (my personal fave is one last look at the sea, but he has an amazing discography)
stephan mathieu
all 11 years of kompact's pop ambient comps
ironomi
riceboy sleeps/jonsi and alex
kiln (especially the album Holo)
swod
logreybeam (this one might be hard to come by, but it's good ambient glitch)
ulf lohmann

a bunch of people already named all the amazing records that are truly essential, this is an amazing thread. bookmark this.

I am pretty surprised that many people like Aphex's SAW II, it is really great ambient album and very good also for reading scifi/cyberpunk books which i do nowadays very often.

eluvium