This constellation of musicians first joined forces at The Big Sur Experimental Music Festival in 2001, but if you break the crew up into variational groupings is clear that there have been earlier collaborations. Diaz-Infante and Forsyth have made some very successful recordings together, and of course tours, both domestically and in Europe. Dan DeChellis and Arnold have already recorded for Sachimay, and all of The Focus Quintet except Dan DeChellis participated on Rev99’s latest and most controversial CD; Everything Changed After 7-11. This means that it’s a tight and well-adjusted bunch that converged for these sessions.

DEDICATED rises in a mist of crackling elementary particles; sharp grains of sand in a cloud of dust, electrically charged, giving off sparks that pinch your skin in little dots of pain… and out of the timbral drone of some string shimmering like a bleak horizon deep inside the soundscape a voice evolves, caressing, fondling, Japanese-like, in wide strokes of human Eastern warmth… and the music vibrates in crumpling static, above which the female voice swirls in slow, graceful motions, like a bird rising out of ashes, like beauty rising out of pain, like ice-cream in the dentist’s waiting room, the sound of the drills seeping out through the cracks in the door…

Further into the music deeper murmurs broaden the timbres, and some few erratic sounds also pass, as the piano enters and drops blue glass beads in sparse distributions through the soaring sound. The sensation gets louder, closer, more urgent – but the atmosphere of otherworldliness doesn’t lift; the druidity remains until the end – and I only wish I could have this piece extended into a full-length CD; it is worthy of it!

FOREWARD starts out as something very Cageish: small crumplings, some dotted, random sounding piano chords… and a voice as out of something Cathy Berberian did, you know, that kind of new music aura, which lends properties not only from Cage but from guys like Luigi Nono too, and other composers who breathed heavily in the 1950s and –60s. In this light this is a very traditional piece; avantgardistically traditional, if that pairing of words is possible… You know what I mean anyway.
Later in the short piece the voice hovers along the line of a bulging synthesizer drone, or it could be some percussion, like a tam tam or a gong, worked with a felt-tipped club of sorts. It gets meditative, still, tilting towards futures with misty mountains and hot tea…

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS introduces itself with distant fire engines rushing by a mile off. It gives me the impression of someone sitting in back of the house in a suburban area in the morning by the pool, a Sunday morning, enjoying the quiet and the stillness; not even a chirping bird – but the fire engine rushes down a street far off… and then the music kicks in, in a duet of crumpling paper and rattling house wares. Piano moves in, electric guitar and the imaginative voice of Anita DeChellis.
This piece is a bit sprawling and straggly, in the positive sense of the words. The singer even happens to sound a bit like Björk here and there, but also borders on – or even enters – the sound poetic idiom. Her wheezing mouth sounds remind me of some of Stockhausen’s performance practices.
The voice tickles and meows its way through piles of newspapers, the piano explodes at certain intervals, a string is rubbed like in works by Iancu Dumitrescu, and the piano gets absentminded as the voice moves up in a Meredith Monk Our Lady of Late fashion, everything oozing out on some sparse guitar and piano inklings…

CONTENTS; an underbrush of little sound events around an old mound somewhere in a rural setting; a priestess of unspecified forces conjuring up the spirits of forefathers in her peculiar, shrill voice, as the instruments bend and sag around her, like a crowd of dwarfs dancing crookedly around their beautiful Queen Mary (she's my friend...) or Queen Jane (won't you come see me...). Perhaps we’re at a site of some forlorn British travelers; self-inflicted outcasts; a shadowy projection of hippie ideologies long since depraved and sunk into the abyss of blind alleys down the lives of post-Woodstock strays… a long ways from the parameters and arithmetic of banks and malls…

LIST OF PLATES sprinkles Debussyan piano spurts into a space centered in a child-woman, cross-legged in her on midst, where the center of the Universe falls in on itself in countless purifications. Yes, there is something of a Cherokee tepee purification ceremony inside this piece, where the concentration is absolute, yet absentminded in that hypnotic way that puts the mind in unmeddled touch with the sources of power at the bottom of matter, the bottom of spirit; equal properties of existence.
I can feel a sort of childish - i.e. direct, unabashed, true, original – investigation going on in this piece, and perhaps this is at the heart of all really good, intuitive musical or existential improvisation.
The music that comes out of this here meeting is marvelous, achieving sublime expressions that convey musical ingenuity as well as a spiritual low-energy fire, which glows and crackles just below the skin of the music.

INTRODUCTION rolls minuscule pebbles into a room with crisscrossing wires that whine and squeak out of all kinds of angles… and it’s a bike repair shop afternoon meditation, the guys sitting down, looking hard into themselves in the heavy smell of rubber and lubricants, oil and grease… and the tools hang solemnly from their hooks on the walls, the biker paraphernalia readily available for asphalt hungering sportsmen in pointed helmets and black tights…
A rumble descends like a deafening infra cloud over the participants in the repair shop, obscuring the goings-on, but the voice that whines in time with the spokes and the wheels starts mumbling intimately to itself, around itself, spiraling inside the infracloud, and the bike repair shop transforms into a cache of vertical thoughts through the jumble of wires, like in a chaotic piano body, strings and screws under tight Cageian preparation.
I seldom hear music that is so infernally inward and absentmindedly introspective and meditative as this, and it must have come about through some kind of collective intuition. This is not something you sit down and calculate, at least not into the detail of the structure; it comes out of the musical moment. Splendid!

BODY starts so gradually that I first though there was something the matter with the equipment. However, it soars into view like the bleak winter’s day outside my Scandinavian window, the music like a transparent layer of frost on the apple trees in the garden.
This piece introduces an unusually modal backdrop of church-like synthesizer sounds, painting subdued layers of brown and ochre as Anita DeChellis uses the lighter colors of her vocal palette, the voice moving in light, elegant gestures as the coin tumbles and rolls on the table and the seven dwarfs rustle about in their tool shed, achieving who knows what kind of fairytale results in the middle of secret life…
The combination here of soft, withheld timbral successions out of the synthesizer, the subtle gestures of DeChellis’ vocals, the dropping and spinning of coins and the more harsh, wood-like or cardboard-like activities bestows a peculiar, close-miked enchantment or spell on the duration of the work, keeping the listener glued to the emerging sounds!

INDEX concludes the CD. It tingles and whispers, giving me visions of a country-girl performing some illicit act out in the barn, moving cautiously among the warm bodies of resting cows, carrying a pail, hand milking without permission in the middle of a rural night… in some poverty-stricken 19th century country days.
The barnyard cat stares intensely at her from its hiding place. The girl is a point of excitement in this restful cow night under twinkling stars… and she hushes the cattle to remain still… the hens cackling silently behind the wall…