Eri Sugai
One of my favorite musicians is Eri Sugai. She blends Japanese folk aesthetics and instruments with highly produced new age vocals, often employing a glossolalia language she developed herself. The layered celestial sound in her first album Mai gives me something clear to mean by the word "angelic" in that it presses my buttons all over the emotional range with a rain of a million shivering cloud-shaped hammers. Certain tracks can sometimes transport me to what seems to be a vaguely altered state of perception, or reduce me to tears, so that I wondered if there was something in the stick of incense included in the spine of the CD case. Ever since, I've been checking every few months to see if she produces anything else, and today that wish came true with Kaori. This album does not have previews on the Amazon site! I can hardly wait for them to ship it to me.