Album: Lo'Jo, Cosmophono, (Irl)

Lo'Jo's Denis Pean (a French cross between Tom Waits and Ivor Cutler) almost talks his way through these fractured trip-hoppish chansons, accompanied on all kinds of instruments (violin, kora, thumb piano, wheezy old organ) by the eccentric collective he founded more than a quarter of a century ago.

On an album quieter and more reflective than 2005's Bazar Savant, the hypnotic pull of finely detailed yet, paradoxically, boldly sparse arrangements, seems to stop time. Exquisite.