Despite the album’s title, there’s something inherently mournful about the sound of the duduk, the Armenian double-reed woodwind featured here. It’s one of Hollywood’s go-to instruments to evoke the ancient and the mysterious, but in the hands of a master like Djivan Gasparyan, it’s much more. The eight instrumentals on this 1983 album have a reflective, meditative stillness, achieved with nothing but two duduks—one playing melody, the other a drone. The result is a haunting and hypnotic lament.