Landscape Traces: New Music For Khaen, Vol Two

The khaen is a bamboo free-reed mouth organ played by ethnic Laotians in Laos and Northeast Thailand. Performed solo, or as an accompaniment to poems and dances, it plays an important role in Laotian identity. Since he began learning the khaen in the 1990s, San Diego-based academic Adler has worked to expand the repertoire of the instrument through his own compositions and those of contemporary composers. The first release in his New Music for Khaen series was Triangulations: New Music for Khaen, Vol One, released in 2020. For the second volume, Adler ‘selected instruments in different pitches and with distinctive timbres’ for each composition, enabling him to explore further the tonal possibilities of the khaen, which he does to great and delicate effect on Kevin Leomo's ‘tracing a line’, and on the opening track, his own composition, ‘Cowries’.

The compositions were inspired by landscape, by natural imagery. Jinhee Han's epic ‘Paysage on Danube’ was inspired by a photograph of Budapest, while Peter Hager's ‘a seasonal rain’ evokes the feeling of rain in a Philippines’ monsoon. These tunes are often sombre and melancholic, as on one of the standouts, David Loeb's ambient ‘Emerging from the Deep’, which recreates in sound the ethereal quality of mist.