- Daisy Press: “You Are the Flower — Music from Hildegard von Bingen, Vol. 1” (StorySound Records)
- Kotoka Suzuki: “Shimmer, Tree” (Starkland)
- Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir: “strengur” (Carrier Records)
“The quality that we call beauty,” writes Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, “must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows toward beauty’s ends.” As the days grow shorter and autumn light sets in, I’m often reminded of Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, an ode to the dark, the inky, and the crepuscular moments in life—moments becoming increasingly rarer thanks to technology. The convenience of a lightswitch overtakes the richness of lighting a candle; an effect Tanizaki describes as “a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow.”