Some doors do not close with a slam. They remain half-open, daring a person to walk back through them after the room behind them has grown small and airless. The past can be persuasive that way. It offers familiar furniture, old names, a version of comfort that asks too much in return. "Backwards, Baby," the latest single from Caitlin Kent-Halliday, begins from that human pressure...

I spent a solid hour this morning watching dust motes suspended in a single shaft of sunlight, my entire nervous system held absolutely captive by Magdi Aboul-Kheir and his devastatingly immersive new album, "Slow Heat". The Germany-based journalist and classically trained pianist usually writes across a massive spectrum of genres, pivoting wildly from trance to late romanticism. Today, he has dropped an ambient, contemporary...