I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but if I did, this year’s list might include: try a little ambient music. Partly because it’s something I know nothing about, and partly to encourage the patience it seems to demand. Lou Reed‘s 20th and final solo album is the pulsating Hudson River Wind Meditations – never intended for general consumption, yet released for the first time on vinyl and streaming this month. The four whirling soundscapes were used by Reed as background music while he practised Tai Chi in his garden. And though I have yet to bust out my sword, it is working a kind of meditation on me, too. The album consists mostly of one strange, celestial thrum which oscillates across various frequencies for the better part of an hour. This obviously sounds like the worst thing ever, and perhaps I am just inured to its hypnotic misery now. But there is something engrossing about it, too: an inner beauty which as yet eludes me. I should also mention that it gets punctuated briefly by the third track, a dainty one-minute field recording of the wind rushing off the Hudson river. Fun! Reed was not the first rock star to turn his hand to ambient work – Bowie and ENO were there before him – but for Reed it was a means of escaping being a junkie and as a result, seems deeply personal. This will probably not be appearing on my Spotify Wrapped, and I’m not allowed to play it in my house any more (by public demand). But it’s still playing in my brain.