Asha ("hope" in Sanskrit) is the adopted name of a transpersonal psychotherapist and composer named Denis Quinn. Fittingly, given the title of the album and the name and day job of the fellow who (for the most part) produced it, this 46-minute collection is like a very soothing session with an exquisitely gentle music therapist who has a warm, sympathetic smile and very big, feathery wings. Music of this kind often suffers from a kind of insipidly sweet repetitiveness - the New Age music as Chinese water torture effect - and there's a share of that here in two or three of the tracks which seem to do little more than meander gently, if inoffensively.

Treated as relaxing background music - softly tinkling ivories, breathy digital synths, the occasional lazy slide on an e-bowed guitar (courtesy of Phil Thornton) - these songs are just fine. But what distinguishes this album are the two selections that have some obvious foreground value. Though cut from the same relaxed-fit cloth as the others, a subtley moving theme flows out of Asha's arpeggiated piano stylings on "Santiago." And in a class of its own, "Sailing on the Silk Blue Sea" features winningly harmonized melodies plucked mostly on Thornton's opalescently glorious (dare I say "pearly") acoustic guitar and a sense of real movement and variation in its rich and perfect arrangement. A few moments of heaven on earth... (Oooh! I see our time is up.)