The Pearl

The Pearl is piano dissolved in treatments, the prettiest thing in this whole list, Harold Budd and Brian Eno building something almost unbearably delicate. It's ambient at its most tender, a record that barely exists and yet lingers completely, and the treated-piano aesthetic it perfected has echoed through a thousand neo-classical records since. It ranks at a hundred and fifty because on this list it's a deep ambient ancestor, but as pure beauty few records here come close.