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.

Strange, hypnotic signals call out like the gleam from a lighthouse on this collection of postmodern celestial hymns. Finis Africae’s “Hybla” is a smoky tribal chant of minimalist, earthy experimentation, while Miguel A. Ruiz’s “Trivandrum” gives way to a submerged industrial trance with a warbling, underlying sense of foreboding. Another key artist on the comp, Víctor Nubla, presents haunted waltzes—something like baroque chamber pieces sprinkled with subterranean fairy dust.

Recorded in 1993 for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, African Skies received its first reissue earlier this year via the new Stones Throw imprint, Listening Position. On commission for Adler, the seven tracks find Cohran decades removed from his seminal works with Sun Ra and The Artistic Heritage Ensemble, but very much in the pocket both tonally and spiritually. A “multisensory, Afrocentric journey into the starlit sky,” the recordings originally served as the planetarium’s score to sweeping panoramic footage of the cosmos as seen from various telescopes positioned throughout the African continent.

In some ways, Shintaro Sakamoto’s fifth record Yoo-hoo follows a continuation of the pop-centric sensibilities of Like A Fable: lifting backdrops of surf guitar, Spector-like orchestration and funky exotica crafted for the dancefloor in a way that only Sakamoto could usher into existence. Yet another work of an auteur of his musical craft, the album sees Sakamoto channel midcentury Japanese styles like “Mood Kayō”, drawing from Latin rhythms and Hawaiin compositions. As has become customary, the musician is able to masterfully curate shadowy corners of the past to create something exceptionally neoteric.

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.

Recorded in the late 1960s by Cape Town pianist Ibrahim Khalil Shihab and his group, Spring calls to mind Atlantic-era Coltrane at its breeziest, with saxophonist Winston ‘Mankunku’ Ngozi fluttering above the steady, sunny backing. Though it has to be said that this collection of musicians could get heavy if need be; check out the masterfully moody vibe they bring to “Birds,” a ten-minute homage to Trane’s “Spiritual.”

Never garnering quite the level of attention of Fukui’s debut masterpiece Scenery, 1977’s smooth Mellow Dream is just that: another soulful, excellent record by the Japanese jazz innovator. Amidst pieces inspired by earlier jazz pianist greats like Bill Evans and Barry Harris, the major highlight “Baron Potato Blues” is an epic piece crafted in the Coltrane/Tyner mold.