The Deaf Center palette is a safe, default riposte to all things ambient. On “Limn,” the Norwegian duo opts for an undying trend in the genre: a heavy reliance on reverb-encrusted piano. It’s a trick used time and time again, but it’s by no means an easy guarantee for success (i.e., it worked wonders for Harold Budd; it nearly sank William Ørbit). The end result of “Limn” may be too contemporary for some, but generally, it works well as an ambient happy medium with potential to appeal to newbies in the genre as well as stubborn vets demanding a more challenging supply.

“Limn” is culled from the Neon City EP, whose 2004 release launched the UK imprint Type Records. Deaf Center’s latest and only full length venture, Pale Ravine, dropped earlier this month on the same label.

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Stockholm trio Tape blurs the lines between noise-pop, folk and ambient, all the while abstaining from the tension associated with the noise paradigm. Harnessing touches of influences as sparse as Oval and Morricone, “Sunrefrain” is an 11-minute-plus hushed opus and can be found on Rideau, their third album for the Swedish Häpna label. Tape straddles its orientation between organically played loops and unpredictable electronics. Rideau saw its release date earlier this month.

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Dr. Alex Patterson and co. brought ambient ideals to a new generation upon the release of their debut full length, The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, in 1991. Due to a peculiar partnership with German minimal electronics giants Kompakt, 2005 has seen The Orb peddling material perhaps more ambitious and forward thinking than anything it’s put out in the last 10 years. These days, the project operates under founding members Patterson and Thomas Fehlmann, and the duo has just released their first proper album on Kompakt, shrewdly titled Okie Dokie: It’s The Orb on Kompakt. Track for track, the release is rather solid; this is something that couldn’t necessarily be said for any other Orb-related items released since the turn of the millennium. “Before Because” is of the album’s more classically serene pieces.

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Dallas-based producer Todd Gautreau runs his own label, Simulacra Records, and records music under a plethora of pseudonyms (the dark ambient of Tear Ceremony, the somewhat chirpier ambient of Sonogram and the recently Arena Rock-signed alias, Crushed Stars). Gautreau’s excursions into ambient music go back at least a decade or so, as implied by the title of his latest Sonogram compilation, Substrates: Ambient Works 1995-1999, which dropped last year. We’re lucky enough to get our hands on this five-minute, never-before-released morsel, “Signals,” which is culled from the sessions that eventually spawned Gautreau’s 1999 full length, Heartbeat Submarines, also released under the Sonogram pseudonym.

Gautreau’s sound is blurred, hazy and calming, at times maintaining a nebulous tension. You could think of it as Boards of Canada minus the drained breakbeats. “Signals” is certainly no exception to this rule.

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Finnish IDM producer Esa Ruoho is best known for work recorded under his Lackluster alias. His birth name is typically reserved for beatless affairs such as the kindly donated “gtr.melod.tamb.” (We don’t get gifts like this all too often, so drink up!) On its surface, the track seems to be decidedly less hardware-driven than the rest of Ruoho’s material. It comes off more like a Múm outtake and less like a recognizable, chip-coated Lackluster creation. Sad clown accordions whimper alongside a drifting, epileptic tambourine and polite, Panda Bear-approved guitar strums.

Even for such a dramatic departure, Ruoho makes the track work masterfully. It illustrates the well roundedness of an often overlooked entity in the discipline of placid electronics.

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