SML rattles and clatters, following slap-dash, stutter-and-roll rhythms through rave-glowing forests of incandescent synths. The personnel comes from jazz, more or less, but you can hear bits of ambient chill-out, early aughts EDM, hip hop, house and free improvisation. Slashing, bumping, “Take Out the Trash” runs on a noir-ish bassline, a bit of David Axelrod’s cinematics or Death in Vegas’ ominous dance grooves in its cowbell clanging, horn-bursting swagger.

Nicola Alesini & Pier Luigi Andreoni’s 1996 ‘ambient-word record’ Marco Polo. Vine-like, lush and minimal, layered and discreet, with assists from Japan’s David Sylvian (vocals), Pierrot Lunaire’s Arturo Stalteri (bouzouki, harmonium), Roger Eno (keyboards, percussion, vocals), David Torn (guitar), and Harold Budd (percussion). Fourth world, indeed.

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.

A seasonal must listen. Winston is, in many ways, the true heir to John Fahey in music and vision: deeply influenced by him without ever stepping on his acoustic toes. His records are often compelling, and always sound beautiful—clean and deliberate, nice ambience, and pressed at the great RTI (a day-drive, not far from where Windham Hill was based).

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.