Six Seasons is a seven-piece release from Chinese American composer Lei Liang. The work blends detailed/ textured violin and viola d’amore playing with field recordings captured from under the ice in the Chukchi Sea in North Alaska.  It’s a release that will appeal to those who enjoy more textural to actively ambient sound craft.

This CD release is from Austria's Kairos Music, with it taking in just over an hour of sound work that sits in between sound art, noise and modern classical music.

 Lie Liang has seemingly been active since the early 2000’s, with eight other albums to his name.  All of his work seems to bridge the musical and non-musical, meaning you’ll need to be accepting/ adjusted to where the two meet & blur to enjoy this composer's work.

For the field recordings made under the Chukchi Sea- hydrophones were placed 300 meters below the sea surface, then left there for a year, so the resulting recordings chart a year in the environment's life cycle, blending sounds of moving ice, marine animals, and underwater sound. To these edited & arranged recordings, we get the violin and viola d’amore playing by Marco Fusi.

Each of the seven tracks has a runtime between five and eleven minutes, with these very much following the sonic story of the year. Progressing from the slow knocking and creaking tones meet the light whistling grates of the first track “Season 1: New Ice”. Though sudden huge tonal cascading, sea mammal wrappings, and more seared/swooned string based tones of “Season 4: Migration”. Finishing with the tight/ high string swoon, neck pluck,  and dolphin baying of “Coda”.

Six Seasons certainly sits in an intriguing place, both thematically and sonically. The idea of blending field recordings with string elements may seem a little abstract, but for the most part it works, with both elements mixed together to haunting, moody, at times seared/ alien sounding results.