Is it "Ah" or "Uh"? The utterance that opens this trio of quiet pieces is subtly startling and ambiguous, setting the stage for the music that follows. Three compositions, one each by the participants, sit well together, comfortably blurring the lines that separate them. In an on-line interview, Koen Nutters talks about a sense of suspended time in his work "A Piece With Memories", and I think the same holds true for all three compositions here. The beginnings and endings are gauzy, and blurred as though seen (heard) through a train window. Voices crop up just out of hearing, half-remembered conversations pulling at our habit of seeking meaning, but not granting any, and all the better for it.

There are slight differences between the pieces. Germaine Sijstermans' "Linden" leans a little more in the direction of melody, its strings of notes moving slowly amid sonorous organ chords while odd bumps and creaking arise and fall in the very background. It reminds me of when people try to be quiet in church and can't quite ever do it. Koen Nutters' aforementioned piece has more voice bits, so embedded in the clouds of chords and sine tones that not even their language can be ascertained. Fading memories in the fog of thought. Reinier van Houdt's "Harmonic Circles" sounds very like its title: revolving tones hang together creating subtle harmonics, which increase in number and novelty as the work progresses. Notes get slightly bent at times, causing the harmonics to shift. There's an eerie metallic sheen to some of them too, causing the ear to lean a little harder. The whole enterprise really does feel like a complete composition in three parts, so well do the pieces hang together. That they all occurred together during a live performance may have added to the general cohesion. A room full of focused listeners can sometimes do that.