This trio of albums combines 20 years of Felix Jay's ambient explorations into a sprawling soundscape sequence.

Byron Wallen's plaintively Milesian trumpet is a relatively piercing element, blending with Rob Luft's aqueous guitar shimmers on the Haden tribute ‘Song for Ch(aril)e’, and the bubbling pulse of BJ Cole's pedal steel on ‘Cochineal’.

The first CD, Rivereyeside Recordings, is full of softly shifting incident, as when the gossamer funk of ‘Fils de Fils de Kilimanjaro’ mildly raises the pulse, and Wallen's wistful conversation with Susan Alcorn's pedal steel on ‘Must It Be? It Must Be!’ forms a flotation tank blues, combining human feelings and the air around them.

The second CD Jazz Gamelan is more intriguing, following in the lineage of Jon Hassell's 1980s Fourth World recordings of ‘world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques’. Jay's Indonesian gamelan percussion, striking metallophones in bell-like sounds which fall through tracks like water droplets, is a meditative constant.

Jay's piano meanwhile, creeps lugubriously beneath Jan Steele's woodwind, while Wallen clears a path through ‘On What Corner?’ This exotic jazz ensemble makes the whole triple­album worthwhile, even before its completion by Jay's self-descriptive piano improvisations, Prepared/Unprepared. Playing and arrangements preclude drift, whatever your tolerance for ambient projects.