As anyone who's been involved with the enterprise knows, large group improvisation holds the potential to offer up nothing more than a big muddy mess. Such is not the case with this recording. Poetics, the fifth release from the GIO, was recorded back in June of 2007 after a concert by Ernesto and Guilherme Rodrigues with members Aileen Campbell and Neil Davidson. I recognized no names from the liner notes, so I was in uncharted territory, as it were, and happily surprised at that.

One characteristic that separates this set from other large group endeavors that I've heard is the amount of space left open. There are of course the masses of tangled lines and boiling arguments in evidence, but these often give way to sparse passages of quiet sounds by one or two players. Witness the opener "Apricot Path". It begins with single string strokes, breathy harmonics and percussion clicks, and slowly gathers steam as more and more players enter with short ideas. There is a palpable sense of tension provided by an underlying drone, before everyone pulls back and starts over. Then the tension builds again, and smallish groups of sounds work together to create cohesive kernels which are then added to by the group. This "slowly adding on, then falling away" technique continues through the rest of the piece's 13 minutes, with occasional forays into background/foreground juxtapositions-tones in the back of the room and brittle scrapes in the front. Toward the end of the piece, groups within the orchestra cohere into ersatz sections: all the strings together followed by all the winds etc. The build and fall maintains throughout, but the builds become smaller as the end nears.

"Dog's Got My Money" starts a little tentatively, but eventually congeals, and "I'm Sorry, But I've Fallen" begins in pixilated space and returns to the layered approach, falling apart as the masses become untenable. The final bit, and my favorite of these intriguing pieces, is a "discretely structured" piece with instructions by Raymond MacDonald to play three relatively short improvisations with short silences in between.