As a pioneer of electronic music who was fiddling with Buchlas before man walked on the moon, Suzanne Ciani found herself careening between two disparate corners of music — the avant-garde in one mode, corporate jingles in another — that spoke to the reality of early synth music being modular in the contextual sense as well as the physical. Her 1982 album Seven Waves doesn’t sound experimental or commercial, however — instead, it’s a finely aged work of compelling instrumentals that eke every last bit of grace and wonder from the last wave of pre-digital analog-synth technology, landing on a midpoint between Tangerine Dream’s pop-ambient instrumentals and the diaphanous pleasantries of the new age music movement that would crest later in the decade. So you get a record informed by classical composition and pop futurism alike, Wendy Carlos via Human League, where baroque melodies and burbling arpeggios sound like a future that couldn’t exist without a 150-year-old blueprint. The conceptual thrust of the album is almost defiantly old-fashioned, too — an ocean-voyage trip into the mysteries of the deep, accented by electronic waves that sound like soothing radio static — and in that way Seven Waves runs through its litany of bright, warm mood pieces with an undercurrent of awe for forces far older and deeper than any of us.