Ankh: Sound of Ancient Egypt
This album is based on a challenging idea: Try to recreate a musical form  from a culture and period that left behind no recordings or musical notation, using only  history, a description of the instruments, and some historical artifacts. It takes intuition as  much as scholarship and craftsmanship to recreate the ancient instruments of Egypt--from  simple percussion and flutes to boat-shaped and triangular harps and trumpets. Atherton,  with his musicians and singers, exhibits both innovation and skill, offering not so much a  look at how the music actually was, but more an intuitive guess at how it might have  been, keeping the music first and history a close but well-heeled second. It can be frantic  one moment and somber the next, as each of these lengthy song suites develops  organically around a song or a piece of poetry--offering both early music and  improvisational music aficionados something unique. Excellent recording quality is  augmented by well-documented notes on history and instrumental research.--Louis  Gibson