Returning to the Heights Unseen (CD) - CD

Details: Flutist Lindsey Goodman presents her second album, Returning To the Heights Unseen. Goodman grasps the listener's attention right away with Roger Dannenberg's "Separation Logic" for flute and live computer processing. In this futuristic work it is the listener's responsibility to determine what is real and what is imagined as his ears are fed short melodic phrases that have been electronically manipulated. It's this sort of electronic genius that allows Goodman to play a duet with herself in the second track, David Stock's "A Wedding Prayer" for 2 flutes, stark and striking. In Tony Zilincik's "I Asked You" for solo flute and mixed media, Goodman competes with samples of spoken text and percussion riffs in "Everything I Love." "I Play Music" boasts a similar challenge, but without percussion and with the addition of the atmospheric pads of a modern synthesizer and the sound of ocean waves. Elainie Lillios's "Sleep's Undulating Tide" for flute in C and live, interactive electroacoustics seems to be a continuation of the previous Zilincik track, until the entrance of a ghostly mezzo-soprano voice-the flutist's herself. Next is Linda Kernohan's "Demon: Daemon," a performance art piece in which the flutist is both musician and actor as she is seemingly possessed by an evil spirit. Randall Woolf's "The Line of Purples" for flute and pre-recorded electronics is the least harmonically experimental of the works so far, but perhaps the most complex to categorize. In Judith Shatin's "For the Fallen" for amplified flute and electronics the listener must decide who is fallen-Adam and Eve? A young soldier? Or the listener herself? Here Goodman offers the entire spectrum of possible flute sounds and colors though an electronic backdrop of dark chimes, pipes, gongs, and cymbals. This masterfully mixed album is a must-have for any new music or electronic music savant.