Here are some good, long (average length 47 minutes) ambient-y electronic recordings such as are good to listen to in the background while you are focusing on something else.
- "Roland TR6S Arturia Microfreak 1 hour Techno Liveset Experiments #19 w/ strymon timeline, HOF, Ph90", Shrink_
This is a one-hour live music set with a single synth and a single drum machine that I listened to last Monday as programming focus music. It's effective techno, completely self-assured, that quickly hits a groove in one of those trance subgenres I never bothered learning the name of. I especially liked the first twenty minutes.
- "Microtonal Tetris", mannfishh
This one might be asking a lot of you, but. This is a rule-based composition based on a two-dimensional just-intonation scale and the tetronimoes from Tetris. Each chord is 4 frequencies related by Tetris-piece-shaped cell positions on a grid of ratios, and each chord "touches" the previous one on the grid. There's a full explanation on YouTube but if you think about how it works it might just distract you.
This is a 36 minute piece consisting entirely of what appears to be two eight-note sequences combined in various ways, with a human operator switching up the tempo and mix levels every five minutes or so to keep it fresh. Honestly, IMO, it works. Sometimes it is good to listen to 8 notes for 36 minutes. Embrace the ambience! Zone out! Satie compels you! Eno compels you!
This person has posted a lot of self-playing VCV Rack patches on YouTube; usually they just leave it running for one hour and that's the video. This one's much more "songlike" than some of the others. It walks a fine razor's edge, really; if you pay attention it seems to have a lot of nonlooping detail, it sounds structured and composed. But if you allow your attention to wander, it returns to being ambient primeval soup.
- "001//Slumber [Melodic Ambient] - 2x Mother 32 and Eventide Space", Alastair Wilson
Remember "Plastic Love"? For a while the "Plastic Love" of YouTube synth jams was "Slumber", the first of Wilson's many excellent ambient self-playing patch videos. YouTube recs played this for me so many times. I didn't really mind though as this is ambient music at its best, low slow tones suggesting musical structure at some geological scale you can't perceive.
(I posted these on Mastodon last week as "What I was listening to today" and then I was going to post them here on Saturday as "What I listened to this week" but then I forgot. So.)