Bird is the Worm

Each of these musicians brought to the table their own influences and backgrounds, in classical, in folk, in avant-garde, in minimalism and ambient drone. And then, with Grdina’s compositional framework in hand, they came together to collaborate, to improvise, to record this music. It goes a long way to explaining why this album sounds like many things at once while sounding like only itself, a singular expression of that moment….And then there are those tracks that fall somewhere in between the two extremes of harmonic bliss and atonal dissonance. “Santiago” is music of the great expanse… the sensation of tiny sounds massively resonant in a sea of tentative silence. And “Wide Open,” which concludes the recording, spaces out its varied expressions, but bridges the gaps across the silence with warped notes bent into strange beautiful forms and bursts of shattered melody that behave as stepping stones across a river of choppy rhythmic waves. A compelling album, not easily categorized…

Dave Sumner

Freejazzblog

…now he explores the possibilities of a string quartet…moving the music away from jazz and into modern classical music and avant-garde, with strong influences from Arabic and Persian music. The combination is not bad at all, it adds the right level of drama and sadness, well balanced with the more cerebral explorations of new sounds and sound combinations. The most beautiful piece is the long title song, the album’s pièce-de-résistance, on which the oud’s warm plaintive phrasings is supported by the hypnotic and melancholy strings. Despite the typical sound of the line-up, for some ears the breadth of the musical journey this quartet takes may still be too far-reaching, ranging from the ancient traditions of the middle-east to the very abstract, at times dissonant modern music, but Grdina manages to use that scope to his advantage, laying bare an austere yet emotionally expressive aesthetic that unites the various genres on this album. A strong achievement and a nice listening experience.