Ambient Music Born From Nature: Field Recordings and Feeling

At a New Year's party, a young producer hands a demo to a man who runs a record label, then spends the night refusing to let it be played. The label owner plays it anyway. When the producer gets home, the phone is already ringing: the room went quiet, everyone listened, and everyone wanted it released. That story anchors a 2018 conversation between Swedish ambient producer Ludvig Cimbrelius and the host Jason, published on YouTube in October 2020, and it opens a larger set of questions the talk keeps returning to. How do you describe music made from brooks, wind, and birdsong when genre words fail? Why does he think intention and emotion say more than a category? And what can music without words carry that speech cannot?

Why is ambient music so hard to explain in one word?

Jason tells Cimbrelius he hears the work as "ambient techno," then admits that labeling it is difficult. Cimbrelius agrees the question is the hardest one he gets. "That question is usually like the hardest one for me to answer," he told Jason in the May 2018 conversation, explaining that he wants to "answer something that feels true in the moment rather than just like repeating genres or mentioning other artists."

He also rejects "electronic," which he says does not fit a body of work he hears as organic. The more useful word for him is ambient, and his description of it is precise. Ambient, he says, is "in the background of all the music I make," and beats may sit on top, but the atmosphere is the ground the rest stands on. That is a producer's way of hearing: the beat is a surface you can count, while the atmosphere is what you live inside.

The labeling problem is also a listening problem. Cimbrelius notes that people who hear "electronic" often picture dubstep or something heavy-hitting, not "the more mellow kinds, the more deeper kinds." His argument is that a genre name hides enormous variety. Techno, ambient, and pop each contain wildly different approaches, so naming the emotion or the intention behind a piece tells a listener more. For anyone trying to find music that moves them, this is a useful habit: describe what a track is trying to do before you decide what shelf it belongs on.

Where did the name Purl come from?

Purl was the first alias Cimbrelius took, around the age of 14. It came from the world around him. He was spending a great deal of time outdoors, and he wanted to turn that experience of nature into music. "Pearl" in the transcript is the brook: the name comes from the sound of a babbling stream, which he recorded and, in his words, was "just in love with."

That origin matters for how he hears electronic sound. The aliases that followed, Eternell and Illuvia, sit alongside his given name in the catalog he has released, but the first one began as a microphone pointed at water. In that sense the music's organic quality is not a metaphor. It starts with a recording of something that was already happening in a forest.

What did listening teach him before he could speak?

Cimbrelius describes his earliest memories as memories of sound. "My earliest memories are of music," he told Jason, adding that his parents later told him that before he could walk or talk, he would sit by the tape recorder listening intently to certain tapes. He had favorites. He had passages he would play again and again.

That early habit of returning to the same few minutes of sound became a pattern in his life. Through hard times, he says, music "was always the center that would like I could come back to." His teenage years were the hardest stretch. He describes feeling lost, not finding his place in school or in any sense of what to do with his life. Music and nature became the two places where he could reconnect, and at that point the work was deeply personal and private. Only later did he begin sending demos and wanting to release what he had been making for himself.

The same idea runs through his account of the process. For him, creating is about "being in the present moment and experiencing that music," translating what he feels inside into sound in a way that he enjoys while doing it. "If I'm not enjoying it then I'm not sharing the joy of it," he said. The music is not built to impress a listener first. It is built to hold the state he was in while making it.

How did a private recording reach a room full of listeners?

The turning point is the party story, and Cimbrelius tells it with the self-consciousness that clearly still stings. He had sent demos to the United States with no response. A friend at the party pointed to a man on the couch who ran a label and urged him to share a demo. The man invited him to a New Year's party and asked him to bring something to play. Cimbrelius refused. He brought the demo, and the man kept nagging him to put it on. "No no no," he kept saying, certain it would not happen during a party.

As soon as he left, the label owner played it. Cimbrelius got a call before he was home. "We put this on and everybody just you know came down in this silence and listened and everybody thought it was amazing," he recalled, as the label owner had described it. "And we want to release this."

"I think that experience just really showed me that like my music really had the power and ability to touch people in that way."

He says the moment brought a rush: "this is what I want to do." Read closely, the story is less about luck than about conditions. A room full of people at a party, with no one prepared to listen closely, went silent. The work was strong enough to make that happen. It is also a reminder that many experimental or quiet records are judged in situations that do not invite stillness at all.

What is actually inside a field-recording library?

Cimbrelius describes a sound archive that doubles as memory. Wind chimes recorded at different times in his life, some while traveling in France. Recordings from friends. Wind striking trees. He says he has kept nearly everything he ever recorded, moving it from hard drive to hard drive through each new computer. He wants to organize the collection and admits he never seems to find the time.

On one of the meditation pieces Jason asked about, he gathered wind and birds into a track built from those recordings, and he describes the birds as part of a meditative state he was in when he captured them. The point is not decoration. A recording of a bird or a chime is a time-stamped fragment of a specific place and moment, and assembled into an ambient piece it becomes a kind of audible diary. The listener does not need to know where the wind was recorded to feel the open air in it.

This is a practical lesson too. If you make ambient or atmospheric work, your field recordings are not just sound effects. They are the emotional material. Keeping them, labeling them, and returning to them is part of the craft, even when the organizing never quite gets done.

What is music for when it has no words?

Jason reads aloud a line from Cimbrelius's Bandcamp biography: "music is a language capable of expressing glimpses of the endless depths of beauty and wonder that resides within us all." Cimbrelius said he had worked hard on the wording of his descriptions, and hearing it spoken back made it feel true. The deeper claim is that instrumental music can say what speech cannot.

Jason makes the same point from the listener's side: the things you care about most are hard to talk about, because whatever words you use do not capture the essence. Cimbrelius agrees that describing the emotion and intention of a piece "seems to say more about what it is." For him, music without words is not a lack. It is the more direct route to the feeling he is trying to share, and his stated hope is that it "may help you find resonance with a loving essence of who you are."

That is a bold aim for an ambient record, and it is worth taking seriously. It asks the listener not to decode the music but to settle into it. Cimbrelius's own practice suggests what that looks like: attention to the present moment, sound gathered from real places, and a refusal to let genre or hype stand in for what the music is actually doing.

Where to go from here

The full conversation is the best way to hear Cimbrelius in his own words, especially the parts about the party and his early listening, which carry a warmth that no summary can reproduce. Then listen to the work itself. His catalog is spread across several names: his given name, Purl, Eternell, and Illuvia, each with its own Bandcamp or website presence. Start with Purl if you want the brook. Start with his own name if you want the broader range.

As an exercise, try the approach he describes. The next time you recommend a piece of ambient music, skip the genre and describe what it is trying to do, what it feels like to be inside, and what kind of moment it suits. The label will matter less than the experience, which is the point he keeps making.