According to iTunes, I’ve listened to The Coldest Season more than any other album in my collection, even more than albums by the expected artists (e.g., The Cure, Low, Slowdive) — and by several orders of magnitude at that. Which is surprising to me, because I honestly don’t remember listening to the album all that much in the nearly two decades that I’ve owned it. That might sound like a dig at Rod Modell and Stephen Hitchell, but listening to the album again while compiling this list, it’s anything but.

The duo’s take on dub-laced ambient techno might just be the epitome of Brian Eno’s maxim that ambient music should be as interesting as it is ignorable. Composed of wintry drifts of sound that bely the album’s analog origins as well as subterranean beats and bass pulses, The Coldest Season more than lives up to its name. This is supremely chilled music that ably slips into the background for late night listening sessions, which typically occur when I’m up to my ears in code and need something to help me enter the necessary flow state to get some post-midnight work done.

But should you take a more active stance in listening to the album, The Coldest Season also reveals treasures. On a song like “Abraxas,” Modell and Hitchell are experts at layering their sounds to produce a dynamic that’s at odds with the glacier-sized slabs of sound that they’re working with. And though several songs stretch well past the ten-minute mark, like “Aequinoxium” and “Elysian,” they’re never boring thanks to Modell and Hitchell’s skillful interplay of wintry atmospherics and crisp, crackling beats that sound like they’re carved from the permafrost.