Another reviewer has beaten me to the line in declaring this album as Modern Classical, and I would agree wholeheartedly with that assertion. It would play in any art space and would support performance. There is the air and space, the drama and the fluidity that translate to human movement. I feel there is a career for Tamea in this segment of the world of music.

See Mark Tamea's Virb site at: http://www.virb.com/marktamea

The call and response of the sonic elements defines the maturity of this work. While there is no rhythm in the literal four on the floor sense, there is a pulse that transports the dialogue from beginning to end.

This album achieves a rare success - it is interesting and it is challenging. It has the mystery of the Mona Lisa smile. It moulds itself around the mood of the listener transporting that experience to a more vivid place. A catalyst of the soul. The snippets of classical instrumentation are pinpricks of light glimpsed through a felt curtain. The Rothko analogy is there waiting for the listener to recognise.

Also evident is the Tessallation metaphor, subtle and cliché-free. The work is a geometric patchwork of sonic components, each in balance with it's neighbour. There is a sonic tension that has the senses primed in expectation. Music is a contract of rules and conventions. And in any work of semi-abstraction, the listener's reception is primed to receive the information bound by those rules. Here, the rules are obeyed, but pushed up to the limit, challenging the listener to fill in the gaps and make something, the sum of the parts greater than the whole, a gestalt, in the same way detailed scrutiny of a painting by DeKooning pulls shapes out of a tangle of brush-stoke expressions. That is what I like about this work; it's success, an expression of poise and balance.

Tamea, a designer by profession has crafted a remarkable cover for this work, in the limited edition of the CD - an origami lotus-flower that opens to present the disk. The artwork, an ambiguous photograph that splashes light against a dark background in the Old Testament apocalyptic manner supports the music appositely, marking a stage in the path from hand to eye to ear that is the act of playing the music.

Landschaft unreservedly recommends this release.