After garnering a reputation for his curated global radio mixes, London-based sound alchemist Elijah Minnelli pieces together a singular fusion of folk, offbeat dub and Cumbia rhythms on sophomore album Clams As A Main Meal. The immaculately layered album balances echoing, frenzied instrumental tracks with vocal tracks featuring cameos by Barbadian reggae mastro Dennis Bovell (on the serene, spiritual offering “Canaan Land”) and Welsh musician Carwyn Ellis. There’s a worldbuilding element to the references, and an enigmatic quality to the righteous mishmash of a musical palette, one best enjoyed floating along and wrapped up in that mystery.

Rubies is not always my favorite Destroyer record—that, like favorite Dylan, changes with the day; there is too much brilliance across too many records to firmly settle on one eternal favorite. It is, however, the best Destroyer record: consistent, nuanced, equal parts enervating and energizing. The album sounds effortless, as if these songs were always there, hovering unseen, waiting to be plucked out of the air and given form by Bejar and his murderous band of Vancouverites. Even after twenty years, I would not change a second. This is as close to perfect as rock records get.

A mosaic of romance and sorrow, Hats evokes a liminal metropolis bathed in the amber glow of sodium-vapor street lamps, where lonely souls wander down moonlit alleyways in search of something that has already left them long ago.

True to Moodsville’s curation, Nice ‘an Cool is nothing if not a “mood album,” the overall unity of the quartet eclipsing any one section of the arrangement. The band keeps dynamics to a gentle hush; Ammons plays his melody lines straight, keeping embellishments to a bare minimum. Still, the ear can’t help but single out Ammons’ tenor sax. His tone is unmistakable: deep, rich, and warm. He doesn’t so much play notes as he breathes his soul into them, tinting each legato phrase with a lifetime’s worth of dreams and regrets.

Some records feel impossible to write about. Not because they lack substance, but because they possess too much of it: too much quiet, too much space, too much mystery. They resist language the way water resists a net.

Fifty years on, you can hear large swaths of the ambient genre echoing through Evening Star: The cosmic calm of Steve Roach’s classic 1988 album Structures From Silence. The neo-classical predilections of Eluvium and Stars of the Lid. The billowing atmosphere of Wolfgang Voigt’s music under the name Gas. The dreamstate travels of Windy & Carl. And so on and so on.

In 1976 the granola jazzists teamed up with one of the most titanic drummers in the sphere, Elvin Jones, for an album that could have marked a major departure for each party. Instead, the pairing allowed both to branch out and sample new realms while doing what they did best. Together, recorded in one day, may not be a flat-out masterpiece, but it does capture the unlikely convergence of two disparate scenes that turned out to have a surprising amount of common ground.

The music winds sinuously, like a river in deep, humid tropics. In six tracks which blend seamlessly into one musical entity, this pivotal collaboration from Brian Eno and Jon Hassell explores a mystical, minimalist music, tinted by Southern Hemisphere sounds but also incorporating 20th century electronics. The cuts move slowly but insistently, a sensuous wiggle in their syncopation.