Ambient Folk

Ambient folk is folk music composed and recorded with the textures and patience of ambient music: acoustic instruments, usually fingerpicked guitar and voice, suspended in drones, field recordings, tape loops and long reverberant spaces. Songs slow down or dissolve into atmosphere, and silence and room sound become part of the arrangement. The term gathered meaning in the 2000s around artists such as *Grouper*, *Espers* and *Six Organs of Admittance*, with roots in the private-press folk of *Linda Perhacs* and *Vashti Bunyan* and a later generation including *Jessica Pratt* and *Marisa Anderson* refining its quietest variants.