A debut recording by composer/musician Andrew Raffo Dewar featuring two immersive experimental works of fragmented melodies, meditative noise explorations and haunting drones.

Six Lines of Transformation was composed between November 2006 and January 2007 for a concert at Roulette in New York City. I wrote the music for this group of people, not simply the instruments they play. One inspiration for the work was the idea of a palimpsest - a writing surface that is reused, both effacing the original and generating a complex, layered record of what came before. The piece begins with one cycle of the original material (track 1) and progresses through three iterations (tracks 2-4) of notated transformational processes to its conclusion, a complete metamorphosis of the original. The underlying rhythmic structure of the original material remains intact, as a faded memory.

Six Lines of Transformation is dedicated to Burmese political leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Music for Eight Bamboo Flutes was created in the summer of 2004 during a project joining four Indonesian composer/performers with four North American composer/performers (all of whom perform the work on this recording), including seminal Indonesian experimentalists Pande Made Sukerta and A.L. Suwardi. During a break between our first period of activity and the next, I travelled to West Sumatra (where I had spent time studying Minangkabau music in 1998 and 1999) to visit friends and think about the work I wanted to create for this group of musicians. I went to Lake Maninjau for a week to compose. On the first day, I noticed that the wind blowing down from the hills around the lake often came from two directions at once, causing interesting patterns of interference with the waves they generated. I wrote the piece with this image in mind. The flutes are Balinese suling that are slightly larger than those used in gong kebyar, and slightly smaller than those in gamelan gambuh. They are tuned to the traditional scale. The subject of the composition is a single long melody that begins in small fragments that are gradually constructed to form the complete melody. This theme is then played in free canon by each performer before being slowly dismantled until nothing remains.

Music for Eight Bamboo Flutes is dedicated to Thai artist Inson Wongsam, who in 1961 packed a motor scooter full of his art and travelled from Thailand to Italy.