When composing and recording this album, Ayami Suzuki was meditating on the way that loss – specifically, to begin with, the loss of her father – is less an event and more a continuing process that affects but is also shaped by everything else surrounding it. It’s a theme that’s hard to express in words, but as it turns out embodying rather than trying to explain it makes for a deeply moving musical experience, even if the emotions Remnants evokes are no more straightforward than the process of loss itself.
Suzuki’s partly improvised ambient soundscapes, usually incorporating some aspect of the human voice — though not always recognizable as such — and sometimes including some equally abstract folk elements, are always subtle and…