Pop Ambient 2013

It's easy to listen to the latest entry in Kompakt's Pop Ambient series several times without feeling like anything's sunk in. That's kinda the point, though—as with every carefully curated compilation before it, this one's designed to heighten your senses and numb your surroundings to the point of utter incoherence. Most of the tracks meld into one smooth, gelatinous whole, leaving certain songs to stand out like a soft kiss or a sudden slap on the wrist. Take Marsen Jules' contribution. Arriving at the end of Side A, "Point of No Return" jettisons the gentle flow of the last four tracks for a jarring rush of fire and ice. That doesn't diminish what came before it; if anything, it enhances it in the same way that the album's final selection (the Pink Floyd cover "Cirrus Minor") is a perfect bookend to the neo-classical invocations of Wolfgang Voigt and Anton Kubikov and the taffy-like drone tones of Leandro Fresco. Fittingly, the last sounds we hear are happy birds, lulling us to sleep until we revisit the record yet again.