CIRCUMVENTION are not the most conventional label, or rather tend away from the mainstream. Always reliable to come up with something interesting and challenging, they have brought together the deft talents of PAT O'KEEFE (clarinet, bass clarinet), JASON STANYEK (fretless & quarter-tone guitars), SCOTT WALTON (piano & bass) and GLEN WHITEHEAD (trumpet). The result is a strange and pacifying album, far closer to mood music than the instruments mentioned above might obviously suggest. Like GUSTAVO AGUILAR's album (which arrived with this CD, and is reviewed elsewhere) they take fairly conventional instruments and 'play with', as opposed to simply 'play', them. So rather than a contrived and laboured attempt at tacking 'more of the same' onto the world of Avant Garde, they manage to conceive and birth something original and innovative. One of the troubles with this sort of experimentation is that it can miss just as often (or more so) than it can hit. Not here. Each of these journeys through the imagination seems to get every nuance of every moment just right. As often strange and challenging as it is warm and welcoming, the journey through this album passes some worrying dark places. Like a winding, dimly-lit corridor dotted with portal windows looking down into pits where LOVECRAFTIAN beings dwell, there often seems a mind-twisting danger staying just out of reach. There's a great resonance to this sound - the music, far from being a stereo representation of a room / box, manages to uncoil itself out of the very speakers in octopus-tentacles of bright sound. Hearing the limitless collage of sounds they seem to weave from mainly acoustic instruments, it just goes to show how lazy electronic musicians really are. It reminds me, both in atmosphere and approach, of the project albums DAVID SYLVIAN and HOLGER CZUKAY created about ten years ago. Large, sprawling spatial things, full of atmosphere and ideas. Originally reviewed for Metamorphic Journeyman.