Do not listen to this album while frying eggs. Or if you have a slight cough. Or if your neighbor is trimming his hedges. If you do, you will miss much of the subtlety encapsulated in the group's moniker.

It is not that hard for a large ensemble to blow its brains out collectively and create something superficially stirring, if not that interesting or original. Far harder is to curtail one's worst impulses as a player and instead do as little as possible, like moving a beach with tweezers, not a backhoe.

This is the first hard document of what is described as the "house band for sfSound’s West Oakland Sound Series", part of bassist Lisa Mezzacappa's version of the Japanese kanreki tradition: 12 releases in celebration of her turning 50, a survey of her own projects and those of her collaborators. Yet the group includes only collaborators Mezzacappa and oboist Kyle Bruckmann from any of her other ensembles, making it stand alone.

The instrumentation comprises cello, voice, bassoon, koto, bass, tenor saxophone, violin/flute/ piano/objects, alto/baritone saxophone, clarinet/bass clarinet/contrabass gardenhose, trombone/tuba/voice, flute/bass flute, percussion, trumpet, guitar/electronics, oboe/English horn and, on one of the two tracks, additional percussion and "natural-object instruments". "West Baying" was recorded in February 2025 and "East of West Baying" two months later.

The pieces are 25 and 23 minutes respectively, and go by slowly, absent the usual cranial overload. Given the wide textural capabilities and physical approaches to the various instruments, gestures are necessarily microscopic and patience is abundant, particularly as certain instruments could easily dominate… pity those getting in the way of a contrabass gardenhose.

Counterintuitively, given the group's name, this is actually remarkably dense music, but introverted rather than bombastic. "Loud" moments come but quickly disappear and breath and friction almost become inverted in their applications. Other groups have worked within a similar aesthetic — Britain's Polwechsel immediately comes to mind — but that doesn't diminish how you want more and more of less and less as this album plays along.