The album opens with a thoughtful, sensitive solo piano piece not unlike Chopin or Satie, with a light touch and a lilting, flexible rhythm, whimsical pauses and longing gazes to the past.  As this piece is played by pianist Russ Lossing, bandleader Gordon Grdina has allowed someone else to receive the opening spotlight, an uncommonly selfless decision.

The second piece immediately and intentionally shatters the reverie established by the emotive opener with a rush of complex scalar figures in unison from the guitar and bass clarinet, and the style suddenly shifts from romantic lounge music to that of challengingly technical and disorienting avant garde.  An exercise in odd meter, this piece keeps an asymmetric, off kilter feel for its entire twelve minutes.  There are alternating sections of whirling, dissonant rhythmic complexity and eerie, uneasy quiet stretches in which all meter stagnates in swamp-like sluggishness.

We make a partial return to the hazy softness of the opener with pieces like "P.B.S." and "Caspar", though these possess more in the way of sickly uneasiness and disconnected meandering.  These pieces have the sense of surreal and sublime as captured by composers like Ravel and Debussy who utilized expanded consonance.

I sense more influence from 20th century avant classical like Bela Bartok and Alban Berg than from jazz.  Where jazz influence does emerge, it's of the note-heavy Dolphy and Coltrane variety, specifically in the inclusion of the bass clarinet.  There is an absolute exactness and precision to the playing which accentuates the tonal subtleties of the highly technical writing. The wilted, bioluminscent balance between discord and expressive refrain found here could only be the result of intense study into the science of harmony.

Grdina does not shy away from feelings of uncertainty and anxiety in his compositions, which takes us across many stormy arctic peaks of remembrance and regret.  The album is truly symphonic in scope, allowing greatly contrasting emotions to emerge tastefully in their poetic time.  At times, the music is tuneful, plaintive and raw in its honest cathartic soliloquy, and others becomes completely beyond parse, spidering out in veins of strange angular dissonance.  The ebb and flow of the music could be described as non-linear.

Grdina himself is not a show-off, rarely becoming the prominent melodic voice.  His guitar playing is surprisingly influenced by noisy rock, with a light overdrive on much of his playing, and several of the longer pieces featuring a climactic section with some serious 'shred'.  He is clearly fond of the texture created when chugging and scraping upon muted strings; at times I recall Sonic Youth.

His other voice is a softer, clean one, to be found during the album's nearly empty quiet sections.  This album has a very wide dramatic range, and its hushed soft moments reach almost Feldman-esque levels of silence and minimalism.  Grdina can faintly be heard sketching tiny, understated spirals of diminished arpeggi.

This album is something of a self sustaining galaxy, a glistening river of ideas and thoughts.  Though its flow is unpredictable and its melodies may not be the easiest to understand, it is a work of true ambition, with beauty and feeling woven all through it.  It is the masterful creation of individuals who genuinely believe in the expressive power of avant garde and technical music. I would highly recommend this to anyone who is not afraid of complex and meaningfully dissonant music.