A duet recording between woodwind veteran (ex- / ) and electronic keyboardist/vocalist might be put in specific new age, ethnic fusion, or progressive jazz categories, but that would be unfair. These performers employ pure improvisation as their prerequisite based on spontaneous feelings to make new music of the moment. is featured primarily on flute, adding soprano sax and other modified instruments alongside the other worldly acoustic piano and amplified keyboards paired with 's ethereal voice, and at times Japanese poetry or prose. There's a measurable density to their music, occasionally interactive, but mostly musings of their own individual concepts that co-exist, and merge as they see fit. While not really conversational, and set up textural soundscapes that bend, flex, and move like mercurial art, with static rhythm a non-factor, and musical color paintings more the objective. The title track might very well depict a salmon swimming up a steadily streaming river, with echoing electronics and flute as a rushing sound palette. Throbbing keyboards and chortling flute identify while ring-modulated type sound and percussion with oohed or Japanese vocal lines represents As the concept of outdoor themes is developed, one gets the sense of being on an intercontinental tour via remote destinations, made surreal through enhanced and exotic aural parameters. is deeply dark and foreboding, is not at all light blue or cloudless, but instead diffuse and colorless, with very little holding it together save a droning effect, while has more call and response than the other pieces. Where succeeds is its perfectly rendered and spaced cry of the water mammal in thinly disguised echoes of sax and vocals, like sparse, small, scattered particles of universal sound. A thornier side of this natural life is represented by 's two-fisted, rumbling acoustic piano during the free improvisation as 's duck snort electric soprano sax provides an obstinate retort. The flute overdubbing on offers up a multi-dimensional dialog not heard in the other selections, and summarily is peaceful. Drink in the graphic art design on the cover, that of a colorful mountain over a liquid desert, as if on another planet or a parallel bizarro universe. That inspiration, somewhat alien, is directly related to the music you will hear on this unusual recording, where nothing is as it was, may seem to be, or could be, depending on one's imagination. ~ Michael G. Nastos