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Quiet Evenings, "Transcending Spheres"
Motion Sickness of Time Travel's Rachel Evans is having a very Emeralds-esque year, unleashing an impressive slew of excellent (and generally pretty limited) releases under a variety of guises. This particular one is her first full-length collaboration with her husband, Nova Scotian Arms' Grant Evans, and it unexpectedly avoids using her characteristic reverb-heavy vocals much at all.  That seems like it should be a significant handicap, but it apparently wasn't, as Grant and Rachel have created a beautifully melancholy and subtly psychedelic ambient opus.
Quiet Evenings is noteworthy in being both perfectly named and quite different from either of its members' solo work.  Transcending Spheres probably shares a bit more common ground with Grant's Nova Scotian Arms' work than Rachel's though, simply because it betrays a clear love of Kosmische/vintage synthesizer music, but it lacks any of the darkness that tends to haunt that project.  Instead, he and Rachel use their synthesizers and treated guitars to create warm and shimmering dronescapes.  This a very womb-like album, which, of course, is not especially novel stylistic territory.  However, Quiet Evenings have clearly spent many of their quiet evenings at home diligently honing their craft, as this album is both sublimely executed and utterly immersive from beginning to end.
The music, for the most part, is constructed of multilayered synth drifts and swells.  Within those narrow confines, however, Grant and Rachel find a lot of room to give each song its own unique character.  For example, Rachel's ghostly, whispered vocals make their sole appearance on "Finality," giving the piece a haunting and dreamlike haze.  Even more striking is the forlorn, theremin-sounding section near the end of "The Inevitability of Decay."  The other five pieces are a little bit less overt in asserting themselves, but there are a lot of minor quirks to enjoy: subtly burbling pulses, buried snarls of distortion, electronic bird noises, etc.  Nothing is quite harsh or forceful enough to ever break the album's pleasantly narcotic spell, but there is enough small-scale unpredictability, passing shadow, and mood-variability to prevent things from ever becoming too edgeless or blissed-out.
Quiet Evenings will probably not get as much attention as some other Evans-related releases, as this is certainly very restrained and low-key.  Nevertheless, Transcending Spheres stands among the best releases from either Grant or Rachel, deftly avoiding the tossed-off feel common to many releases by folks this prolific.  It is possible that many of these pieces began their lives as improvisations, but it is obvious that a great deal of effort and care ultimately went into creating a coherent, dynamic, and beautifully textured whole.  As far as ambient albums go, it is hard to get much better than this.
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