You are familiar, no doubt, with the nerdiest icebreaker in the book: If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have one album with you, which one would you choose? The grim tidings of Spring 2020 offer a variant question that’s much less appealing, and far less hypothetical: Suppose you were hunkering down to ride out an unprecedented global pandemic, and had to pick an album to accompany you in quarantine… well? Leo Takami, a guitarist and composer from Tokyo, provides a credible last-minute answer. His Felis Catus & Silence was released on the Unseen Worlds label just as coronavirus brought its spread of decay to American shores. The music is beguiling and beautiful for its own sake, and seems to offer everything the socially-distanced might need right now: It’s quiet enough to drown out the terrors of the outside world. It’s placid enough to reset the pulse and cleanse the mind. It’s almost decadent in its loveliness, unblinking in its modest rebellion against a season of death and despair. And it’s borderless enough that, if your bunker is wired for Spotify, you’ll be pointed down plenty of tributaries worthy of further exploration. 

Takami’s compositions— there are seven of them here, ranging from two-and-a-half to nine minutes— are so delicate in their feel, so elegant in their structure, so unhurried in their pace that you might almost miss how evolutionary they are. It’s evident from the disinfectant cheer of the opening keyboard tones and muted marimbas that Takami is rooted in New Age ambience and Japanese environmental music, idioms noted for their minimalism. And yet the great paradox of Felis Catus is how the music is at once so streamlined and so generous, spring-loaded with fairy dust and wind chimes and babbling brooks and other sensual pleasures, each one its own tiny sanctuary. Minimalism is all about acknowledging negative space, but Takami’s music unfolds with a real sense of abundance, string sections and choral effects magnanimously extended like presents on Christmas morning. That generosity is never more evident than on “Unknown,” the record’s deepest discursion into jazz guitar, where Takami lets loose a geyser of round, clean notes that place him in a lineage with Charlie Christian, Jim Hall, and Pat Metheny. It’s as if he is dead-set on giving you as much jubilance as he can fit in before the song winds down And what about the record’s spiritual kinship with bossa nova? Just listen to the insinuating pulse of “Garden of Light,” its cool, tactile breeze, its subterranean melancholy. The governing concept here is gagaku, a Japanese folk form known for its courtly melodies. It’s the well Takami drinks from as he shapes his subtly progressive music into narratives of fluid grace and unified purpose.

Felis Catus leans toward the pastoral, even the idyllic, but that’s not to say it exists at a complete remove from this world’s rot and corrosion. Takami has expressed an interest in cycles of life and death, which you can hear in almost every song here; midway through the title cut, the floor seems to disappear right out from under it, and for a few moments there’s roaring silence before Takami’s idyll is rebuilt. “Children on Their Birthdays” promises merriment in its title but delivers something considerably more depressive in its melancholy piano notes; think of those scenes in Pixar’s Inside Out where colorful childhood memories fade into adulthood’s doleful shades of grey. The best moment on the album comes in its last song, “Quiet Waters,” an endless cool river that dips, just for a moment, into a brooding apparition. For a season the quiet waters sound troubled, but by album’s end they’re once again flowing in peace and tranquility. It’s oddly provocative. Who dares to believe, in times like these, that trouble might be fleeting? That any beautiful thing could ever carry on?