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
(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