Stevie Wishart (violin), Jim Denley (wind instruments).

The cover of this CD is adorned with manipulated photographs of land, presumably somewhere in Australia, where a lot of the source material for the music comes from. The music itself is also made at least partly by manipulating and adding to recordings of natural environments. But whereas the visuals suggest the altering of nature by an artist, the sonics seem to point toward a joining together of everyday sounds and more intent-laden'music'. For example, the longest track on the CD 'west of west', starts off with insect buzzings, quickly joined by six-year-old-with-a-straw sounds, then it gives way to almost recognizable flutings. Frogs, traffic, and we're into a bit of some travelogue music, which uses the frog voices as part of the structure. Solo frogs, stones, intercuts by some alien-sounding (in this context) electronics, and then bird song, which gives way to crowd sounds and we're suddenly in the middle of some human gathering, an MC and some children chattering away. "Now that's the way you spend Sunday arvo..."

Under this the birds come back as a loop, and then some bass flutterings and string pizzicato, (though it's almost unrecognizable), over which a bamboo flute improvises. A ham radio conversation leads into static approaching and receding, more voices, and a loop of a barely tuned in radio station (thunder), stones return...these sounds are all treated in various ways and re-appear throughout the piece in increasingly altered form. My favourite bit of the piece is a buzzy loop joined by a static-laden radiobeat, (plus voices) which becomes the basis for a very appalachian sounding fiddlesong.

And it all sounds perfectly natural., flowing like a daylong journey cross-country, the travellers joining in with the sounds around them as they move. An idea that is very near to my heart.

As music, it kept me glued to my stereo, wondering what would come next, and I hope to hear more from these cogs in the Machine For Making Sense.