Seishin Takeno's "Echoes," a sonic postcard from Kanagawa. Nine instrumental pieces, I've been told. Not nine songs, mind you – more like nine shaded windows into a particular kind of quiet. This isn't music that yells; it leans in, like a friend confiding a secret you half-hear on a summer porch. Immediately, you're not so much listening as remembering. Or maybe anticipating. It feels...

One rarely encounters a title as forthright in its ambition as what Nikiré offers with "ETERNITY beneath the stars of God." This single from Tom Arild Junge’s philosophical project is not something you’d play while sorting the recycling; it demands, and subsequently creates, a specific kind of quiet. The Enya comparison is there, certainly—a female voice gliding over vast, ambient soundscapes—but the effect is...