A duo based in Brooklyn, Mountains deserves the attention of anyone in the market for meticulously layered, slow-seep music for dreaming. Not that all is uneventful placidity here – unlike many of their genre-mates, Mountains don’t only employ, manipulate, and mangle samples and field recordings, they also play instruments (acoustic guitars, for example, lends a quality of Fahey-esque weird Americana at times) and construct melodies of a gently obsessive, insistent kind.

Centralia is Mountains’ finest effort yet, refining rather than redefining the approach of their first two albums. Given generous playing times in which to grow themselves out, tracks such as “Circular C” and “Propeller” evoke a spellbinding luxuriance that is all the more impressive given their spare, pared-down beginnings. Fans of Emeralds, early Oneohtrix Point Never, Popol Vuh, ambient Eno, among so many others, should all find safe harbor here.

Inaccessible to debate, however, is the fact that the early ’70s were a time of transition for many of Brazil’s established bossa nova and samba stars. Marcos Valle, for instance. He’d been doing well for himself for several years when the Tropicalia movement, led by Os Mutantes and others, came along and brashly fused traditional forms of Brazilian popular music (MPB) to some of the most radical,  disorienting aspects of 1960s psychedelia, leaving performers whose success predated the phenomenon with a quandary: whether and how should they respond to the new dispensation?

Valle responded with a series of records considered by many to be the best of his career. Previsão Do Tempo, released in 1973, lives right at the heart of this period. Consult the album cover in the corner; it gives a pretty good visual queue to what’s happening here. Valle’s always already delicate, supple MPB stylings are held underwater  for a while (metaphorically, you understand), just long enough for them to grow blurry and light-headed, dreamy and lightly drowned. Sonically this means that we’re immersed in a soup of warm, weird analog synthesis; slow-motion jazz-funk guitar and Fender Rhodes;  and a sleepily soulful version of Brazilian pop, one that extracts the maximum emotional impact from a potentially over-rich farrago of textures. The melodies are the sunbeams refracted in the pool, if you’ve born with me this far.

Ten Holt, who died at almost ninety-years-old just a handful of months ago, was perhaps the preeminent figure in Dutch classical music during the last decades of the 20th century. It is only somewhat recently that his oeuvre has begun to receive much attention from American listeners, a process sure to be accelerated by the domestic release of this beautiful monster of a box set, which contains several hours of spellbinding performances by gifted pianist Jeroen Van Veen, a long-time Ten Holt collaborator.

Ten Holt’s compositions for piano (his favorite instrument by far) employ gradually shifting, pulsating melodic cells, certain aspects of which — tempi, dynamics, and coloring, for example — he left to the discretion of the performer. The pieces here — almost all very long and likely to induce either trance or stupor according to your taste and temper — range in mood from elegiac to powerfully uplifting, but the most representative is the first, the seemingly endless “Canto Ostinato,” which winds and unwinds with hypnotic intensity over nearly eighty minutes,  gradually developing into a deeply moving tour de force. The piece stops time even as it rushes you through it, and displays Ten Holt’s sensitivity along with his strength.

Is this a step forward or a retread? I’m not really sure yet. What is immediately plain, however, is that the determinedly mysterious duo of Hth and Krig (yes) remain utterly expert both at the conjuring of dread-soaked, Lynchian atmospheres and at the violent rupture of said nightmare-scapes via distorted-to-shreds blast-beaten cataclysms. Blut Aus Nord are their closest stylistic kin, but at times I am even more reminded of the eldritch ambient efforts regularly exumed by the Miasmah label.

For minutes at a time this can sound like the black metal band that should have been signed to 4AD in its halcyon days, but then more hell breaks loose than can be reasonably dreamt of in that scenario, and the special nature of SPEkTR’s bleak vision bleeds through.