2020 albums that impressed me the most sounded like a ceremony.

All belong to a wider range of neoclassical music.

Would you like to witness delicate musical poetry that is so fragile that it is lost if you are not in true silence and solitude? Greg Haines, one of the most talented composers nowadays, founded this project in which he teamed up with Kleefstra Bros.The Alvaret Ensemble – Ea is an intimate Nordic magic.

https://laaps-records.com/album/ea

Do you plan to go on a tribal journey to the edge of consciousness? In the album At Once, There Was No Horizon, Vieo Abiungo created a perfect sound design, a rhythmic ceremony that sounds like Jon Hopkins from the jungle, narrative like a Dionysian ritual and full of ghosts like a forest.

https://williamryanfritch.bandcamp.com/album/at-once-there-was-no-horizon

Sincere idealism like a cathedral, pure, melancholic and sensitive, such is the orchestral music of Max Richter. Voices is a ceremony of humanism supported by the reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I also recommend his intimate tribute to the 250th anniversary – Beethoven – Opus 2020.

When was the last time you were in a temple and experienced a mystery? A blend of sophisticated electronica, voice, ambient and the Middle East, that’s Mansur and 2 debut albums – EP Temple and LP Karma. The Mesopotamian temple, the crystalline sound design, the oraccus and the elements that literally circle around you. It can lift you through the stratosphere, perhaps to the psychedelic cosmos.

Music for meditation, yoga or sleep? Original love for sound and detail can be felt from the album Toán – Volte no Vento. It’s like meditation in a garden where environmental devices are set up. Some work on the principle of tapes, some vinyls, others are like home-made machines and hinged tools striking in the air. Each one has its own texture and plays some sound caught in life. It’s soothing ambient alchemy.

https://iikki.bandcamp.com/album/volta-no-vento

Few more of the many albums, that are worth listening:

Ólafur Arnalds – Some kind of peace