The hesitation to call the liminal, jazz-like blobs of sound on That Wasn’t a Dream “ambient music” comes down to detail: Anything so precise and obviously intentional requires—or at least rewards—a little more engagement. Palladino is a fretless bass player with a mile-long resume that includes D’Angelo, Adele, and The Who; Mills is a guitarist and producer whose subtle experimentalism has made him in demand across the underground and mainstream both as a session and live player (Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan) and a producer (Perfume Genius, Japanese Breakfast). Together, they bridge the polite weirdness of fusion and smooth jazz with the hybrids of newer labels like International Anthem, conjuring micro-bits of bossa nova (“I Laugh in the Mouth of the Lion”), funk (“Taka”), and pastoral folk (“That Was a Dream”) that unspool like hold music for interdimensional phone calls—the background, made foreground.