The First Log(!)
Albums LISTENED TO:
Mother Earth’s Plantasia (1976) - Mort Garson 🇨🇦 | Talkie Walkie (2004) - Air 🇫🇷🇬🇧 | Peng! (1992) - Stereolab 🇬🇧
Surround (1986) - Hiroshi Yoshimura 🇯🇵 | Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes (2014) - Thom Yorke 🇬🇧 | Twoism (1995) - Boards of Canada 🇬🇧
Blue Lines (1991) - Massive Attack 🇬🇧 | Sakura (2000) - Susumu Yokota 🇯🇵 | Confidencias (1981) - Rocío Dúrcal 🇪🇸
Another Green World (1975) - Brian Eno 🇬🇧 | A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular (1996) - Hooverphonic 🇧🇪 | Zones Without People (2009) - Oneohtrix Point Never 🇺🇸
R Plus Seven (2013) - Oneothrix Point Never 🇺🇸 | Tender Buttons (2005) - Broadcast 🇬🇧 | Green (1986) - Hiroshi Yoshimura 🇯🇵
For the last few weeks, I’ve been in the weeds trying to get The Listening Room set up amidst planning the continuation of my opera project from this past autumn. Mentally I’ve been all over the place; from intense anxiety regarding visa renewals to fears that my German skills won’t be enough to pass an important language exam, I’ve been looking for consistency and relative calm with what I listen to. I also made the VERY brave decision in this time period to delete TikTok (hold for applause……………) due to the fact that it has truly destroyed my focus and productivity. All of this led me to turn toward predominantly electronic music with ambient and minimalist tendencies - a specific area I certainly wasn’t always interested in, but one that’s becoming more important to me every day.
To be honest, electronic music has historically rubbed me the wrong way, not because I inherently didn’t like it, but because I associated it with the many listening exams in composition forum during my undergrad. It’s that thing of when you’re FORCED to do something, even when it’s as seemingly enjoyable as listening to music, it makes you not want to do it. Now that I’m far enough removed from that period in my life and my revisiting of ambient/electronic music was intrinsically motivated, I’ve started to realise what I was missing all this time.
I started the cycle with Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia, a light-hearted and humorous album written exclusively for a Moog synthesizer (one of, if not the first commercially available synthesizers). I actually heard the title track a while back on a TikTok about recommendations for surrealist film, so it was cool to hear it in context. A lot of the tracks feel very much like character pieces you’d find in a ballet, and many moments feel akin to a sort of late-60’s, Burt-Bacharach-style songwriting. If Plantasia is more theatrical, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s albums Surround and Green are more muted and hazy, but with a somewhat similar use of synth. Both of these were super enjoyable, but because they’re more solidly “ambient” works, they lend themselves more to passive listening. If anyone is looking for music to study to, for example, both Surround and Green would fit the bill perfectly. All three of these albums have an organic quality to them, which is ironic considering they’re only written with artificial sounds. It just goes to show the incredible range of what synths can do.
Susumu Yokota’s Sakura feels like a natural progression from the previous two albums. It’s still very chill and ambient-focused, though it’s got more rhythmic intrigue through both actual drums/percussion as well as synths with slightly sharper attacks (meaning the beginning of the note is more clearly defined), and what sound like MIDI instruments. This one is a bit less “passive” to listen to, but it’s still very easy to get caught up in the sound worlds, as I did. There’s a sample of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians which was fun to hear, and it’s interpolated seamlessly into the track it’s used in. Twoism by Boards of Canada ups the ante even more with influences of trip hop. I struggled with this one a bit; a lot of the tracks seemed to have this very empty feeling, most likely due to the album’s mixing or general emphasis on higher frequency sounds. I was introduced to Boards of Canada by a track called “Olson,” their second-most-listened-to on Spotify. I loved how simple it was, which made it that much more addictive. Twoism also generally has simple musical ideas, but the production makes it feel uncomfortably barren rather than solid and musically self-assured. There’s also some awkward tags onto a few tracks that feel like they should’ve either been gotten rid of or expanded into a stand-alone track/interlude.
Moving on to a full-blooded trip hop album, Blue Lines by Massive Attack was a generally enjoyable listening experience, though I was a bit thrown off by some of the more eclectic vocal choices, as well as the fact that, to my ears, it sounds super dated in a not-so-cool way. That said, it’s well-produced and it has some definite highlight tracks (“Unfinished Sympathy” and “Lately” were standouts for me). It just didn’t connect with me like it might’ve connected with the Ben of five years ago. A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular by Hooverphonic has a similar dated quality, but this time with more musical intrigue. All of the moments with heavily distorted guitars and drums don’t feel out of place amidst the predominantly electronic sounds, and the chord progressions are often surprising in a good and satisfying way. Since listening to this album, I’ve heard a few stand-alone tracks by Hooverphonic that I greatly enjoyed, so rest assured there’ll be more of their albums appearing in these posts.
Both Peng! by Stereolab and Tender Buttons by Broadcast have their own clearly defined vocal styles, neither of which I like… at all. These two were actually my lowest-ranked albums primarily for this reason: that sort of breathy, straight-toned sound that for whatever reason grinds my gears. Tender Buttons has a sort of Lana Del Rey vibe to some of the tracks, who’s an artist that I’ll admit I also struggle getting into... don’t hate me… Peng!’s biggest fault is simply that it’s boring; there’s really no musical highpoint and the mixing generally feels off - the vocals are strangely removed from the rest of what’s going on sonically. I’ve read that Stereolab’s other stuff is in a different sound world than this one, so I’m nonetheless interested in checking out other projects of theirs.
I was really intrigued to listen to Zones Without People by Oneohtrix Point Never (OPN), the stage name of Daniel Lopatin, considering he’s the man responsible for the scores to a few of the Safdie Brother films, including Uncut Gems and the more recent Marty Supreme. The album started off in a way that immediately grabbed me, with dense synth harmonies and engaging chord progressions. Production-wise it gets a bit harsh and abrasive as it goes on, but it maintains moments of pretty stunning beauty throughout. While it was described as an ambient album, I’d hesitate to agree as this project demands your attention for basically its entire runtime. On that same day, I listened to another album of OPN’s, R Plus Seven. This one was just… A LOT. It’s got a very chaotic quality to it, with each track having multiple distinct musical ideas that often feel like they should be their own separate thing. Because of this, there wasn’t one track that I genuinely enjoyed all the way through, though there were shorter sections in many of them that stuck out to me in a positive way. From a technical standpoint this album is insanely impressive, it’s just a bit too bombastic and all-over-the-place for me to really enjoy it to the fullest. If that’s more your speed though, I’d give it a try.
This next album was my highest-ranked of the group, Thom Yorke’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes. I’m a casual fan of Radiohead and I think I may have listened to one other solo album of Yorke’s, but this one really stuck with me. I listened to this super early in the morning after a sleepless night (thanks to jet lag after coming back to Vienna from Chicago); the surrounding stillness made the experience that much more special, especially as I noticed the sun starting to peek over the horizon by the end of the album. In my notes while listening I wrote “it feels like you’re watching a cityscape in reverse,” which points to that sort of surrealist quality that I love in art. This was also one of the best-paced albums I’ve ever heard; each track was in conversation with the previous and following one in a way that made total sense. Another highlight was Air’s Talkie Walkie, a dreamy and spacey album with some Björk-isms, Sufjan-Stevens-esque vocal lines and maybe even some hints of LCD Soundsystem. Though the musical texture is often dense, thus making it difficult to pick up on the lyrics, the production is captivating and just eclectic enough to consistently sound fresh throughout the runtime.
The final two albums are both at the top of my rankings, just under Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes. I’ll start with the major outlier in the group, Confidencias by Rocío Dúrcal. I heard a song from this album on TikTok; drag-queen-superstar Valentina (of RuPaul’s Drag Race fame) lip-synched to it at a bar in Madrid, and I was immediately captivated both by her performance and the song itself. Though it’s a pop record, it’s got an operatic quality thanks to both Dúrcal’s vocal style as well as the orchestral accompaniment on many tracks. As I don’t speak Spanish, I’m not entirely sure what’s being said, which is fine considering The Listening Room is first-and-foremost focused on the musical qualities of these albums with lyrics taking a backseat. But from the few words I could understand, a lot of the tracks seem to be about love (shocker, I know) that’s unrequited, growing or dying. Anyway, it’s an absolutely captivating album with a grandness to it that’s addicting to listen to. As it is with many albums in this style, there’s a pretty clear structural formula that’s followed track after track, but I don’t care. It’s just really, really good writing. At certain moments I even got some ABBA vibes, which is always a good thing.
The last album in this cycle is one that I listened to for the first time in 2021 but wanted to revisit: Brian Eno’s Another Green World. Eno has become a very important part of my life recently, not only as he was one of my most-listened-to artists in 2025, but also because his Music for Airports played a major role in my Master’s project at the Royal Academy of Music. What was really cool, though, was that he received an honorary doctorate at my graduation ceremony this past summer, meaning I was seated nearly within arms-length of the legendary “non-musician,” as he’s known to call himself. From what I remember he didn’t say a single word during the ceremony, but his presence in the room alone was special. ANYWAY… I remember liking Another Green World when I first listened to it, but I’m not sure I knew what to make of it. I was certainly not interested in ambient music in 2021, nor anything that was really remotely experimental. That said, there was apparently something about it that stuck with me, causing me to give it a 4 out of 5 in my initial database. This time around, I understand the album way more. Having since heard both his earlier stuff with the iconic Roxy Music as well as his later, full-fledged ambient works, Another Green World feels like a near exact middle ground, thanks to the fact it consists of both “typical” pop/rock-oriented vocal tracks as well as ambient, nearly exclusively electronic pieces. The track names are also absolutely perfect and describe the sonic worlds of the album phenomenally. This might just be an all-timer for me, next to Music for Airports. I cannot recommend enough checking out not only this album, but also the other amazing projects Eno has been involved with over his almost six-decade career.
Well… I think that’s all for now. These posts might take a slightly different tone or form as time goes on, but I’ll just plan to go with the flow. Please do reach out with any comments or ideas, and if you do check out any of these albums, let me know! I’m anticipating the next post will be in a similar vein to this one, but we’ll just have to see where the wind blows me I guess. Also, if you have anything you’d like me to check out and/or potentially write about, let me know through the contact page or via Instagram @benhoppe722.
If you made it all the way to the end, thank you so, so much for reading. I’m really excited about this project and can’t wait to see where it goes from here!
Ben <3
