Lijnen was the first ECM album devoted to the Estonian composer Helena Tulve, born in 1972. Its six works, written between 1997 and 2004, trace a decade of her chamber music, moving from ensemble pieces to settings for voice, saxophone quartet, flutes and string quartet. Form stays fluid throughout, and sound and sonority carry as much of the argument as melodic line.

Tulve studied with Erkki-Sven Tüür at the Estonian Academy of Music, then in Paris, where she took first prize in Jacques Charpentier's composition class and also studied at IRCAM. Four pieces are played by the NYYD Ensemble, the Tallinn new music group that conductor Olari Elts formed in 1993 and that has carried her music in its repertoire ever since. Arianna Savall sings the title work, and the flutists Emmanuelle Ophèle-Gaubert and Mihkel Peäske lead abysses. The Stockholm Saxophone Quartet plays Öö, recorded live in November 1997, and the Silesian String Quartet plays nec ros, nec pluvia..., recorded live in Tallinn in April 2004. The ensemble works were taped in 2001 and 2006, mostly at the Estonia Concert Hall, and Manfred Eicher produced the album.

The opening à travers (1998) was one of two works recommended in the young composers' category of that year's International Rostrum of Composers. Lijnen (2003) is a dedication to Luciano Berio, written in the year of his death. It sets poems by Roland Jooris about lasting, penetrating influence, summed up in the line "The reed suggests the absent wind." Savall's voice moves inside a fine web of winds, strings and percussion that seems static from outside while its energy slowly rises and falls. ECM hears in Tulve the French spectralist school and electroacoustic music alongside the Estonian landscape and language she names herself, with points of contact with non-idiomatic improvisation.

The record entered the quarterly list of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik in 2008. In The Guardian, Andrew Clements described a soundworld often dominated by wind instruments and wrote that "behind this take-it-or-leave-it façade lurks music of real personality and expressive depth." On Deutschlandfunk, Frank Kämper called it a promising debut on record. In the booklet, Wolfgang Sandner writes that much of her music "works as if it were not composed, as if it just happened."

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 1955, released on 20 May 2008 with liner notes by Sandner in German and English.