Both Sugarhill Gang’s “Rappers Delight” and Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music For Airports contain the name of a genre in their titles. For rap, this wasn’t a problem. For everyone in what became ambient, it has been likely more hassle than help, even for Eno himself. Nobody knows, to this day, what ambient is meant to indicate beyond slow tempi and certain tones and delay settings, maybe. For Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo, released in 1979, the same year as Ambient 1, ambient is just not the right word for what’s going on. I bring this up as preface because what we have here is music that unfolds slowly, usually without more than one or two instruments playing at the same time. Sometimes we hear just a piano, or a harp. But is that ambient? Lovisoni and Messina are both committed composers, and the album was produced by the Italian electronic visionary Franco Battiato. There’s synth, voice, and glasspiel (singing glasses), and this would be classed with Feldman or Cage if the cover art were black and white and if the album was ten years older. Music this powerful and careful could have a different name for its cohort, like Slow Notated or Church Improv—anything that isn’t minimalism (“Oh, like Steve Reich, got it”) or ambient (“oh, like spa music”). This all matters because of how people find the music to begin with and how seriously they take it. This album deserves as many listens as you want to give it. A solid classic.