Brian Howe

The ambient composer goes back to raiding his decades-deep personal archives for vintage tape to revive with new perspective and fresh feeling.

Eighteen musicians? In this economy? The Michigan post-minimalist recasts Steve Reich’s landmark composition as a solo project with a sleek, dark-hued electronic palette.

Pitched between heat-seeking acid house and ambient bliss, the techno auteur’s first album since 2013 is a beat-music odyssey that thrums with spiritual resonance.

The Norwegian trumpeter’s ninth album feels like an opaque and ambient jazz album you can walk right into. Truly, his instrument always seems on the verge of speaking.

In 2013, the composer Ben Frost and librettist David Pountney devised an unconventional opera piece inspired by the 1984 psychological horror novel The Wasp Factory. Its music is shockingly beautiful.

This new LP is the first in a six-album series from ambient artist James Leyland Kirby. It’s an extreme continuation of the concept—memory loss—that guided his 2011 masterpiece, An Empty Bliss...

Bibio’s collage and pastiche-based music is hard to pin down, but his latest beams with a relaxed joyfulness that is refreshing after a spate of more laborious records.

William Basinski doesn’t play a single note on his new album Cascade: the tape-loop-and-delay technique that produced it is akin to Eno’s on Ambient 1: Music for Airports. It comes with The Deluge, a related studio recording where Basinski filtered Cascade through gradually elongating feedback loops, creating the sound of something being almost remembered.

Blending classical and rock instrumentation with glitchy beats, ambient electronics, and stagy vocals, the Icelandic band Múm’s music taps into a spirit of childlike wonder. The best songs on Smilewound, including a bonus track featuring Kylie Minogue, hint at svelte, engaging electro-pop.

Jon Hopkins has hovered around the edges of dance and indie rock for several years, playing with Brian Eno, Coldplay, and King Creosote—and even seeming to take a backseat on his own records. But Immunity, the producer’s breakthrough fourth album, bounds and writhes with its own life force.