When Wire, a nightclub in Leeds city centre, recently announced its first residency, it came with a calm-inducing addition: ambient listening sessions.

Held in the daytime and curated by the Canadian DJ Peach, they offer panel discussions alongside meditative music as an antidote to the harsher club environment.

Ambient, which its creator Brian Eno described as offering “a space to think”, has evolved from sophisticated muzak into one of the coolest genres around (Pitchfork declared in 2002 that the ex-Roxy Music member “is ambient”) .

Ryan Bassil, Vice UK’s associate editor, got into ambient after being invited to a listening event at Eno’s studio. “I was 23 and hadn’t really heard ambient music before,” he said. “It didn’t occur to me that you could be entertained by music without any vocals. But I found Music For Airports and started banging that out regularly.”

Phil Leigh, of Leeds-based Norman Records, says he first noticed a surge in interest in ambient about a decade ago when albums by The Caretaker, aka James Leyland Kirby, and releases by the Japanese label Home Normal began to sell in large numbers.

It’s a trend that Stephen Pietrzykowski, a co-founder of the east London record store World of Echo, says has continued among older and younger fans. “The music seems to be popular with a range of age groups,” he said. “I don’t think it’s age-contingent, it’s interest-contingent. It’s not so much music for the casual music fan.”

The interest in the genre has given older artists a second act. Gigi Masin, the Italian ambient producer who released a string of albums in the 1980s, and Suso Saiz, who was making similar music in Spain at the same time, have both been celebrated after reissues by the Amsterdam-based label Music From Memory.

The Orb’s 17th album comes out in March and includes a tribute to the late cosmologist Stephen Hawking. In February the renowned record digger Chee Shimizu will have his 2003 book Obscure Sound (described as “Michelin Guide for record nerds”) reissued; the original release was credited with inspiring renewed interest in ambient. Now ambient fans have the 9128 website, which streams the genre exclusively, 24 hours a day.

The German ambient stalwart Gas has released a triple-vinyl reissue of his 2000 LP, Pop. The man behind Gas, Wolfgang Voigt – who co-owns Kompakt records – has curated the Pop Ambient compilation for the past 20 years. “What I like about ambient music is that you can use it as functional background music – as atmosphere, as well as focused listening music,” he said. “Nowadays I can listen to ambient music the same way I used to listen to Pet Shop Boys or Prefab Sprout in the 1980s.”

Part of the inspiration for Peach’s ambient sessions, which are held at the Outlaw Yacht Club, was her nostalgia for “chillout” rooms, which became unfashionable in the 00s but were a mainstay of 90s clubbing, with ambient music by the likes of KLF and Aphex Twin creating a slower pace. The other inspiration came from Leeds itself, where local acts and collectives – including Brudenell Groove, Zoya and Anna Peaker – are part of a healthy local scene.

Some ambient re-releases have come from a stranger source: the corporate world of 1980s Japan. Eno famously suggested that ambient music should be “as ignorable as it is interesting”, with the goal to be it fitting into the environment it was created for. In Japan that idea was taken further by corporations that commissioned pieces to provide subtle soundtracks for, among other things, a perfume by the cosmetics giant Shiseido and a headquarters for the Wacoal lingerie company.

That corporate music has been reissued over the past decade and found a willing new audience. “It’s comforting,” said Bassil, who loves corporate Japan’s go-to artist Hiroshi Yoshimura. “Putting on a record that’s both familiar but not obtrusive or jarring is like placing your head on your bedroom pillow.”

Ten years ago Eno wrote a piece for Prospect about the “death of uncool”, where he discussed the way ambient had become divided into various sub-genres including black ambient, ambient dub, ambient industrial and organic ambient. “We’re living in a stylistic tropics,” he wrote. “There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with.”

The current era of everything being available all the time is what Bassil thinks has helped drive the renewed interest in ambient. “With regard to ambient artists – Eno, William Basinski, Hiroshi Yoshimura – I don’t know where you could find this stuff before a couple of years ago. A lot of it still isn’t on Spotify. But get recommended one of these videos by a friend and you quickly find yourself in a YouTube wormhole.”

There are reservations about whether the renewed interest in ambient is at odds with its original purpose. “Ambient music has become fetishised somewhat in the past few years, and the re-evaluation of Japanese music from the 80s has been central to this,” said Pietrzykowski. “But the music isn’t consumed in the way it was originally intended to be. It’s studied and evaluated, put front and centre, and as such it’s not really ambient any more.”