This double disc is a collaboration between Ryuichi Sakamoto and Christian Fennesz, with the former man taking a decidedly dominant role throughout. The concept behind the album is fairly straightforward: on each night of a 24-date tour, Sakamoto wrote and performed a piano piece in a different key. By tour's end, he'd explored every possible tonal variation within Western notation. He provided these short, jewel-like solo piano melodies to Fennesz, who laid them in soft beds of gently caressing electronics. The results are very pretty…

A collaboration between two of the best-known names in ambient music, the Japanese musician Ryuchi Sakamoto and the Austrian electronica artist Christian Fennesz, CENDRE is a hushed delight from start to finish, containing stately, minimalist pieces such as "Aware," "Kuni," and "Amorph." Fennesz provides the weightless electronic backdrop, into which Sakamoto drops precise chords that ripple the aural surface like smooth pebbles dropped into a pool.

A reduction in personnel rarely results in a broader musical expanse, but that's just what happened to Food, since trumpeter Arve Henriksen and bassist Mats Eilertsen departed in 2004. Molecular Gastronomy (Rune Grammofon, 2008)—Food's first duo recording, though the use of guests fleshed the group out to a trio—was Food's most accessible album to date, without sacrificing any of its inherent risk and sound of surprise. Quiet Inlet—Food's first for ECM, and featuring Austrian guitarist Christian Fennesz on three tracks and Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer on four—follows Molecular Gastronomy's path, but remains equally traceable to earlier albums, including Food's quartet swan song, The Last Supper (Rune Grammofon, 2005). Even as a duo, Food generates a lot of sound. Strønen, in particular, combines bastardized drum kit, hand percussion and technology into a distinctive soundscaping approach, from pulse-driven to textural; spatially ethereal to jagged and dense. Ballamy's more economical playing is equally key in establishing a group sound, and based on its performance at Punkt 2006, Food could easily have continued on as a duo, but increases the unpredictability quotient by introducing a third player to the set.