Most fans of Maggi Payne will primarily be aware of her work within the fields of electronics and synthesis. Some will have encountered her incredible acoustic efforts for extended flute, and her contributions, arching across a diverse number of practices, to seminal recordings by Peter Gordon, "Blue" Gene Tyranny, David Behrman, Joanna Brouk, Annea Lockwood, Deep Listening Band, and others.

Arctic Winds, a double LP worth of material that was originally issued as a CD in 2010, takes us deep into rarely heard territory of Payne’s singular and diverse creative practice. Across four sides, 8 discrete works, built from location based field recordings, unfold on a monumental scale, each sound slowly unfurling to reveal delicate intricacies, collectively gathered to sculpt a free standing, spacialized aural realm.

Vast and imagistic. Multiple perspectives and trajectories existing as a single, unified form. Echoing, tactile ambiences of evolving meaning carry the listener into their depths, rendering intimate detail, experienced from the inside out.

Through flirting glimpses - the sounds of dry ice, space transmissions, BART trains, and poor plumbing - the familiar becomes the unknown, transforming at every turn into an otherworldly event.

Gathering a body of archival electronic experiments, recorded and composed between 1984 and 1987, the second LP in Aguirre’s expanded focus on Maggi Payne, Ahh-Ahh, offers a stunning window into her extended activities during the crucial era when her first LP, Crystal, was composed.

These works belong to her body of practice that reached into the multidisciplinary realm, having been created for the performance group Technological Feets, formed by the video artist, Ed Tennenbaum, in the San Francisco Bay Area during 1981, combining dance, live video processing, and music.

First released to great acclaim in 2012 by Root Strata, across the album’s two sides, pulsing rhythms and tones, created on an Apple II computer and samplers, dance and arpeggiate between the brooding and playful, calling to mind everything from Midori Takada, to the soundtracks of John Carpenter and Bernard Parmegiani. Rippling, sweeping ambiences build a bridge between the worlds of new age, ambient music, and the minimal realms of composers like Terry Riley, traversed by abstractions that startle the mind.

An immersive world populated by pulses, swells, drones and cascading rhythms, Ahh-Ahh is an absolutely brilliant and unexpected series of responses to the call from the moving body. A vital document of Payne’s early collaborative efforts, as much as is a crucial artifact within the history of computer based music.