From ambient bliss and Swedish pop zingers to Americana’s best-kept secret, the Observer’s critics pick some of this year’s releases that deserve a wider audience
![Hidden gems 2021: great albums you may have missed](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3266b8bbb6a9d283ce2688c6a2194bba03cbbd4a/0_0_1955_1173/master/1955.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdG8tZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&enable=upscale&s=13c42273aa6c4565d0af29a4a3f2b8f5)
(Longform Editions)A 39-minute immersive meditation, Nine Movements is the work of California-based
Australian composer Matthew Liam Nicholson, based around the harmonic interplay of singing bowls, LA jazz outlier Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s strings and babbling-brook percussion. Encounters with this work in the wild include venues as disparate as the Bargello National Museum in Florence, where the singing bowls received their first airing, and a session of the finished work in “full multichannel spatial audio at a massive outdoor temple at Burning Man”. Ambient
music can often be theoretical or medicinal; this record is both. Kitty Empire