Music by Phill Niblock
The second piece, "Early Winter," is even more extreme, with 51 individual "voices" (computer-generated, live and recorded) creating what the composer calls a "thick mush" of sound and sustaining a single, textured drone for 45 minutes. About 15 minutes into it, my wife, kids and dog ran howling from the room. However, under the right circumstances, this piece is even more mind-altering than the first. My own breakthrough came at about 20 minutes, on headphones, during my morning commute to Seattle across Puget Sound.  All of a sudden I got the point (at least for a while), and began to imagine a totally new type of music, with only minute differntiations in pitch (everything played, say, in or around G major), which used tonal color, intensity and duration (and, of course, naturally occurring overtones) as its means of expression.  Extreme, yes, but worthy of consideration. --Bill Tilland, OptionThis CD contains two compositions"Five More String Quartets" and "Early winter" both of which are long, sustained sound universes that slowly change in pitch and timbre, redefining the form of the sonic space they simultaneously create and occupy.  For example, in "Early Winter" for string quartet, multitracked bass flute, sampled and synthesizer voices and flute, harmonics slowly apppear and vanish like the slow onset of winter weather.  "Five More String Quartets" creates ghostly different tones by the detuning/retuning of pitches from multitracked strings. --"Blue" Gene Tyranny, All Music Guide