As George Lewis recently said, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between improvised and composed music.   It’s a distinction he would like to see dropped.  For much of its length this delicately nuanced recording could quite easily be a formal electroacoustic composition, an impression strongly reinforced by the fact that Evan Parker sounds curiously unfamiliar in this new grouping.   He’s well used now to working with electronics, but this was a first convocation of this quartet with Max Eastley, Graham Halliwell and Mark Wastell, and in the full but not unduly resonant acoustic of St.James the Great in North London, the four musicians move round one another with the gracious decorum and unfussy discipline of monks walking a prayer path.  The track titles taken from ancient Japanese folklore perhaps suggest another provenance, but there is nothing pictorial or impressionistic about this music.

Wastell’s metal percussion and the sliding tones from Eastley (or is it Halliwell?) sometimes recall honoured British improvisation of the kind associated with Ovary Lodge, who offered similar hostages to critical fortune by providing haiku-like titles.   This is estimably quiet music and eminently reasonable, which might seem a strange word in the circumstances.  Listen to Parker alone, insofar as one can separate even him from a shared soundworld, and he could be examining his sound and its processes rather than spinning a linear narrative.  One always tends to reach for ‘stillness’ as a shorthand for music of this kind, but that’s wrong too.  It’s all movement, but movement of a markedly abstract and ratiocinative sort, coming back to its own subtly altered premises at the end of each of the three pieces.  The notes suggest that, having embarked on this small pilgrimage at the recording, the group are now working regularly.  That’s excellent news.”   -    Brian Morton,  The Wire