http://instagram.com/jnsilva This mix started with two discoveries. First I found a great ambient blog called Ambient Landscape . I have found lots of music through the site, most notably the fantastic album by Dylan Howe, New Designs on Bowie's Berlin , which made it on to my year end lists. The second discovery that inspired this mix was a series from Aural Films called Fog Music. I believe they up to 25 releases which you find here... FOG MUSIC . There's some nice stuff in there & I liked...
Jan 03, 2015•1 hr 1 min
I've mentioned many times that a mix often starts with a single track that interests me and takes off from there. In the case of this classical mix, the track is "In Spe" by Arvo Part. I first heard the piece via YouTube & loved it right from the start. As far as I can tell it has not been recorded for official release so the version in this mix is the performance I heard on YouTube. You can find the original ten minute track here... In Spe, Arvo Pärt, Georgian Sinfonietta Creating a classic...
Dec 28, 2014•1 hr 7 min
I am very excited about this mix. It comes from Josh Furey, the man the excellent indie label Nocturne Records . The mix consists of ambient and slower vintage 8-bit video game music. It starts off with a cut from Disasterpeace from the album FEZ . I had just recently bought the album and was thinking about doing an 8-bit type of mix myself when Josh sent me his Cartridge mix. Wow, am I glad I didn't bother with my mix because Josh's blend of 8-bit music and video game sounds and tunes is perfec...
Dec 02, 2014•53 min
I love the music of Loscil. I have been listening to Loscil for ten years and I look forward to new releases more than ever. Loscil made it into my mix of favorite ambient artists and my mix of favorite ambient albums of all time. I consider Loscil music to be perfect ambient/electronic music. Scott Morgan is the man behind Loscil & he has just released a new album - "Sea Island". I knew I was going to like it even before I heard it and I was right. This new recording is everything you'd exp...
Nov 19, 2014•59 min
Here's another entry in the Sunday Morning Music series. This follows the template fo earlier mixes - mostly instrumental, some vocals, some jazz, some old some new. I called it Fall Back because it was intended to be posted last weekend when daylight saving came to an end but stuff always seems to get in the way. My favorite cut in the mix is "Art Decade" by Dylan Howe from his excellent album, "SUBTERRANEAN - New Designs On Bowie's Berlin." The album is a set of jazz covers of Bowie's Berlin i...
Nov 09, 2014•1 hr
This mix grew out of a collection of vacation songs. I wanted to put some tunes together for relaxing on the pier or around the fire. Once I started finding songs I decided to make all of them vocal acoustic tunes and the rest just fell into place. The whole mix is nice and slow and quiet. And of course acoustic. There are a few great covers here, like the Sarah Jarosz & Phosphoerscent covers. I used some all-time favorite artists in here - Avetts, Sufjan, Andrew Bird, Iron & Wine, Paul ...
Sep 28, 2014•1 hr 35 min
Back in July I featured a guest mix from halftribe. It was an excellent mix & a nice break for me. Well, Ryan Bissett(halftribe) has kindly offered another mix and I jumped at the chance to post it. This mix is absolutely pure ambient bliss. A beautiful collection perfect for any time of year or any time of day. I've been listening to it at work and have used it as sleep material as well. Give it a listen/download, I'm sure any ambient lover will enjoy this mix. Also swing by Ryan's halftrib...
Sep 10, 2014•56 min
cinemagraph by Julien Douvier - http://juliendouvier.tumblr.com/ Sometimes I go through phases of music listening. I'll listen to a bunch of old prog rock for two weeks then move on. I pull out some old Cantebury Scene stuff from the 70s for awhile. Then I'll go on an early 80s new wave binge. Then Americana. Then ECM jazz. This mix came out one such binge. I've been listening to a lot of Jean Michel Jarre & Tangerine Dream lately. Jean Michel Jarre was a college favorite of mine. My girlfri...
Aug 31, 2014•1 hr 2 min
You're driving, and it's dark and it's raining, and you're on the edge of the city and you've been driving all night. And you took a turn back there but you're not sure it was the right turn. But you took the turn anyway, just kept going in that direction. And somehow it looks sort of familiar, so you just keep driving. Hello. Excuse me. Can you tell me where I am? You've been on this road before. You can read the signs. You can feel your way. You can do this in your sleep. This is a mix I did f...
Aug 02, 2014•1 hr 3 min
This is one of those mixes where the title pretty much says it all...Summer Sleeps. I found that if I keep titles fairly straight forward and clear that plays on Mixcloud go up a bit. I listen to music every night when I go to bed. And lately I was getting bored with old sleep mixes so of course the solution is to make a new one. There's not much else to say about this mix, just lay back and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. T R A C K L I S T : 00'00 Stephen Vitiello and Taylor Deupree - From the ...
Jul 20, 2014•1 hr 41 min
The timing on this could be better. I've been very busy lately and haven't been able to do a mix. So it's the perfect time for a guest mix. This mix comes to us from Ryan Bissett who produces ambient music as Halftribe. What I love about guest mixes is that I'm usually unfamiliar with many of the tracks. And this mix does exactly that. Only two artists were known to me before I heard this mix. Thanks to Ryan for introducing me to even more new music that I'll never have enough time to listen to....
Jul 06, 2014•1 hr 3 min
I know this blog is supposed to be about ambient music but over the years I've posted some outliers - "Quintessential Jazz" "Footsteps" "Psalms and Lullabies" "Sunday Morning Music" "Vox Electronix" and some other odd balls. It gets a little boring just mixing nothing but floating ambient so it's nice to branch out every now and then. This mix, "Always & Forever," is definitely on a different branch of the musical tree than ambient. It's a collection of Americana style tunes that I've been l...
May 18, 2014•1 hr 7 min
I've already done a "Favorite Ambient Albums" mix and a "Favorite Ambient Artists" mix so it makes sense that there would eventually be a "Favorite Ambient Tracks" mix. And here it is. Ambient music is definitely not a song based genre. I like to remember works as a whole or an artist's work as a whole. There are artists that I absolutely love but can't name more than a handful of specific tunes. So it sort of goes against form to make a list of fav ambient tracks. That being said, when I sat do...
Apr 26, 2014•2 hr 9 min
Grab a cup of coffee and the paper with this mix as your Sunday soundtrack. This iteration of the Sunday morning series uses mostly new music including a couple of great Bob Dylan covers from Sarah Jarosz and Phosphorescent. I couldn't resist starting the mix with the wonderful "Morning" from Beck's new release. From there we move on to a beautiful, jazzy track from Philémon Chante that I have been itching to use for a while. That cut is from his album called Les Sessions Cubaines which you can ...
Apr 06, 2014•56 min
Most regular visitors to this blog are aware that I also post these mixes over at Mixcloud. I love Mixcloud. I got in very early on and so have developed quite a few followers. It's been fun watching it grow. One thing that has helped in growing that following is being one of the featured cloudcasts in the Ambient/Chillout category. Well, apparently now Low Light Mixes is also one of the featured cloudcasts in the Classical category. Some of my mixes my have some classical related tunes but I de...
Mar 23, 2014•1 hr 1 min
One of the benefits of making & posting mixes for all these years is getting to know some like-minded folks from around the world. One of those is my good friend, Jason O'Gorman, from the city of Cork in Ireland. Jason did a guest mix for me way back in 2008. Wow, typing that just made me realize that Low Light Mixes has been around for a long time - 8 years this month, an eternity in internet years. Anyway, back to Jason. You can find his 2008 mix called Satellite here... Satellite . I real...
Mar 09, 2014•1 hr 11 min
stirring up the dust ghosts from the past whisper in grooves of forever There's a first for this blog - vinyl haiku. I was looking for ways to describe this mix and as I collected expressive words, the list started to take on it's own poetic quality. So I thought, what the heck, I'll just formalize it into an actual haiku. It was fun, I haven't written any sort of silly haiku in years. Anyway, the haiku fits this mix because the music is all dusty and scratchy. It all has a old vinyl feel to it....
Feb 02, 2014•54 min
This mix is a rare treat. It's a guest mix from Chris Fraley. I know Chris through correspondence and postings at the Hypnos Forum. I've been a member of the forum for a long time and I really enjoy the community there. In this time of social networks and twitter it's nice to see that a classic forum still survives and thrives, mainly because of a shared love of ambient music. Activity there ebbs and flows but there's always interesting topics and people hanging out. As I said, I know Chris thro...
Jan 17, 2014•30 min
It is freakin' cold here in Wisconsin right now. It's going to be -20f below zero tonight and the high temp on Monday didn't get much above -10f. Frigid temps like that call for a mix. It's perfect timing for a freezing mix because a recent purchase was the album arctic conditions by stormloop. With song titles like "Ice Wind," "In The Frozen Morning Light" and "Arctic Conditions," it was a perfect starting point for this mix. Make some hot cocoa, sit back and try to stay warm. Of course for lis...
Jan 06, 2014•1 hr 8 min
The title of this mix pretty much says it all. This is a collection of tunes that works well at night. I didn't want the mix to be dark & depressing or dark and scary, just something that feels more at home at night. It's sort of the opposite of the Sunday morning mixes. Although a few tunes could go either way. I didn't start out making a "night" mix, it just sort of happened on it's own after the first few cuts. The mix opens with a fantastic remix of Bowie's Sound & Vision. This cut i...
Dec 28, 2013•1 hr 11 min
I love dubby ambient. I think this is my third dub mix this year. I'm sure I'll grow tired of this style of music but for now I'm soaking it in. It was snowing while I made this mix & the music just seemed to fit the winter mood. Hence the name "A Winter's Dub." Many of the tracks in this mix came from Bandcamp. As a matter of fact, all the links in the tracklist are to Bandcamp pages. I love Bandcamp. So easy & convenient. And great for discovering new music. I bought a bunch of stuff t...
Dec 14, 2013•1 hr 41 min
I know this is not the best time of year for sitting out side and stargazing. At least not here in Wisconsin. But I haven't done a stargazing mix in a long time so i thought I'd throw this out there. The piece that got me started on this mix isn't an actual song. It's NASA's Voyager spacecraft recording the sound of interstellar space. Voyager's plasma wave instrument detected the vibrations of dense interstellar plasma, or ionized gas, from October to November 2012 and April to May 2013. You ca...
Dec 06, 2013•1 hr 58 min
About a year ago I did a mix of my favorite ambient artists of all time. I have been meaning to do a mix of my favorite ambient albums of all time ever since. And now here it is. I did not go back and look at my favorite artist list. I sorted through my ambient collection and came up with my fav albums. Then I compared the two lists and not surprisingly they are almost identical. Basically I substituted Scott Solter for Alio Die when I made the fav album list. At least I didn't repeat any tunes ...
Oct 26, 2013•1 hr 1 min
As I have said many times before on this blog, a new mix is very often born when a track or two inspires me to create something new. In this case it was the new album by Esmerine called " Dalmak ." The group recorded the new tracks in Instanbul and the whole album definitely has the texture and feel that one would associate with Turkish music. The Constellation Records website describes it perfectly... "As a title for Esmerine's new album, "dalmak" refers in a literal sense to immersion in the c...
Oct 17, 2013•1 hr 2 min
found a cool clip on YouTube from the Beatles Abbey Road album. It is the 16 minute medley that closes the album but it's only the vocals. It's fascinating to listen to familiar vocals in a new way. Here's a link to the YouTube clip... Abbey Road vocals . The vocals for "The Sun King" caught my attention and I thought they'd make a nice start to a new Sunday morning mix. I couldn't resist messing with the track a little bit so I slowed it down and mixed part of that slowed down track under the n...
Sep 09, 2013•1 hr
I happened to come across a new tune from Moritz Von Oswald Trio. The song, Blue Dub , has this great, slow, sparse dub thing going on that I love. I knew as soon as I heard it that I'd have to make a new mix of dub related tunes. So, "dub transmissions" is, duh, is mix of dub tunes. I've done them before & this one is similar to the others. I think the previous ones have had parts that are a little noisier & spacier than this mix. Most of these tunes have a beat, although that beat can ...
Aug 13, 2013•1 hr 16 min
Sometime around 2001 I discovered the album Tides by Arovane . I'm not sure if it qualifies as "post-digital" or "blip hop" or "micro" music but it was through that album that I began a brief love affair with the style of music known as "glitch." I have always loved electronic & ambient music but at the end of the 1990s I had lost interest in berlin style electronics and mostly listened to straight ambient. But with the emergence of glitch, and it's use of complicated beats, noise and sample...
Jul 28, 2013•57 min
This mix is completely different from anything that I've posted here. It's not ambient, or electronic or Sunday morning jazz. This is music for motion. This is a mix I made last summer to listen to while biking. I liked it so much that I added some new tunes this year and made it longer. All of the songs have a propulsive, forward-moving feel to them. There are some oddball choices in there but generally most of the music would fall under the heading of indie rock. Artists include Yacht, Vampire...
Jul 17, 2013•2 hr 8 min
At the suggestion of a listener I set out to do a mix of ambient covers. Not so easy. But I did find a bunch of Brian Eno cover tunes. Some I was familiar with, Bang on a Can & Sakamoto, but many of the others were new discoveries made by cruising the web. The mix starts with probably the most covered Eno tune - An Ending (Ascent), from Apollo. The cover of that song comes from a new album by Icebreaker & BJ Cole which covers the entire Apollo album. It's excellent and any Eno fan will d...
Jul 06, 2013•57 min
I usually keep different folders of music for different types of mixes. I have a "sea" folder. And one called "dub & stuff." Another is "piano." And of course several "Sunday morning" folders as well. The folder for this mix was called "just plain old good ambient." And that's a pretty darn good description of this mix. There's no special theme or concept other than the fact that these cuts are all excellent ambient tunes. The mix has a classic sound, classic feel. However, only one track is...
Jun 23, 2013•1 hr
