The Wave

Composer Marcus Davidson has form when it comes to mixing things up musically, blending an ethereal chorus with the intense drone of buzzing insects in The Bee Symphony and sampling aquatic sounds in Sea Polyphonies. His Standing Waves cohort, violinist Roger Huckle, is no stranger to eclecticism either, having played with Dexys Midnight Runners on their 1982 breakthrough Too-Rye-Aye and later forged a career in classical music. Describing The Waveas ‘ sound adventures in the stream of consciousness,’ the pair throw East and West into an electro-acoustic melting pot of ambient sounds and wordless vocals richly stirred by improvisation and experimentation. It seems to be a journey from awakening (the frenetic ‘Tabla Dance’) to enlightenment (‘Sky of Consciousness’) largely carried along by Huckle's shape-shifting violin, Davidson's liquid keyboards, assorted ambient sounds and an often thrilling but uncredited tabla (presumably the pair's sometime collaborator Sanju Sahai).

The epic two-part title-track ranges from Eastern European Gypsy camps to the desert expanse of Mongolia (Jayson Stilwell's throaty overtone singing) via the Middle East with earnest intent. Kat Kleve's vocals weave through ‘Frog Chorus’ with infectious brio and lifts ‘Hildegard's Dream’ (borrowing from the visionary 12th-century abbess of Bingen) into a hallucinogenic, Indian-accented dreamscape of bubbling tabla rhythms, droning tanpura and New Age forest sounds.