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.

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.

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.

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.”

Deep in the heart of Nicolas Jaars latest album, theres an extended domestic vignette: Jaar, a small boy, at home with his father, the Chilean visual artist Alfredo Jaar. Their talk, in Spanish, is playful and perhaps inconsequential; its actual content matters less than the way their voices charge the music with a special aura. Here is a tape, the snippet seems to say, rescued from a box long forgotten in the back of a closet; here is a memory brought to the light of day.It signals the extent to which Sirens—depending on how you count, either his second or third or fourth proper album—is the young electronic musicians most personal recording yet. As he explained to Pitchfork, with his previous records, he had taken aspects of his own identity for granted. "But in the months leading up to Sirens," he says, "there was a lot of change in my life—when you come back from a long tour, you really have to pick up the pieces in a way."And the album really does feel like a process of unpacking. It takes stock of the elements that have long characterized his work—the slow tempos, freeform arrangements, and shadowy atmospheres—while confidently pushing into a number of new directions at once. The pensive piano and effects of the opening "Killing Times" give way to a fairly rocking vocal number that sounds for all the world like a cover of the Bauhaus side-project Tones on Tail. "Leaves" incorporates a plucked string instrument—koto, perhaps—with ambient textures in a way that suggests an ambient musician like Biosphere. "No," the song that features his childhood home tape, taps into a spongy reggaeton beat faintly reminiscent of the Berlin producer Poles scratchy ambient dub—though the songs examination of his multi-national identity (Jaar, whose Chilean parents fled their home country after Pinochets coup in 1973, grew up between Chile, Paris, and the United States) also recalls the Ecuadorian-American musician Helado Negros own multi-lingual self-portraits.There are further surprises along the way: "Three Sides of Nazareth" hints at New York proto-punks Suicide as well as the contemporary UK musician Powell—which is pretty funny, because in most respects youd never think to mention Jaar and Powell in the same sentence. And it ends with a gorgeous, airy doo-wop song that cant help but bring to mind the Beach Boys weightless harmonies. Whatever else Nicolas Jaar may intend with his choice of title, theres no denying the seductive power of the final songs ethereal web of harmonies. Like everything on the album, it draws you in.