Twelve Albums for Immersive Listening

I'm not opposed to background music, but these records deserve your full attention

There are so many different ways to listen to music. Every one of them gets my approval.

They range from the casual use of mood music to grand moments of ecstasy at a life-changing event. Everything from ritual to romance has its special music pathways. You just need to know where to find them—and be brave enough to take the journey.

I’ve encountered a lot of hostility to background music, which I don’t share (although I once did). But I’ll skip over that subject for the time being. Right now I want to focus on the opposite end of the spectrum, or what I call immersive listening.

Today I’m recommending 12 albums that will swallow you up—heart and soul and everything else. They provide peak musical experiences of rare intensity and immediacy.

You just need to open yourself up to what they have to offer.

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Immersive listening isn’t for the casual fan. But it’s also different from the analytic and quasi-mathematical mindset taught in conservatories and music appreciation classes.

It is more of a bodily, visceral experience.

The goal of immersive listening isn’t understanding the music—it’s feeling it. Even better feeling part of it. A dancer at a disco is probably closer to the spirit of this approach than a musicologist studying the score of a Beethoven string quartet.

I’m talking from firsthand experience here.

I started out like that musicologist studying the score. But today I’m more like the dancer at the disco. In my early years, I was almost too rigorously analytic in the ways I assimilated the music tradition. Some of the most important breakthroughs I’ve made in my own work over the last 25 years have required me to un-learn much of this early training.

I’ve even turned to controversial alternative approaches—Hemi-Sync, binaural beats, singing bowls, etc. I would have scorned these things in my youth. But I’ve learned that—and this is a humbling admission for a music writer—some of the most vital aspects of human song cannot be analyzed or verbalized. They must be felt and internalized rather than studied.

If you want to develop this kind of immersive approach to listening, it helps to use the right kinds of music. For reasons I’ve discussed elsewhere, long tracks are better than short ones—although even short tracks can work if they connect together seamlessly enough. A certain kind of flow in the music also assists in achieving the flow state in the listener.

These twelve albums won’t let you down. Feel free to offer your own suggestions in the comments.

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Fela Kuti: Zombie (1977)

The 1970s recordings of Fela Kuti are as close as modern commercial music gets to the immersive bardic songs of ancient times. The tracks are long, hypnotic, irresistible.

And those who believe that trance-inducing music is an escape from this world may be surprised by the intensely political and activist essence of these performances.

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John Luther Adams: Become Ocean (2014)

They talk about desert island music, but this is the real thing. If I could, I’d send you off to an actual desert island where you could listen to this music while surrounded by an immense ocean.

That’s what this single 42-minute track feels like, even when I listen in the comfort of my home (preferably in a dark room with my eyes closed). I can practically smell sea salt in the air.

Don’t just get your feet wet, dive in.

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Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, and Panaiotis: Deep Listening (1989)

You can’t get a much more immersive setting than the one that produced this album—a trio session recorded in a cistern in Pt. Townsend, Washington, some 14 feet below the ground. Oliveros is not only a practitioner of immersive music, but also its leading theorist. Check out her book Deep Listening from 2005.