Three extended improvisations recorded at the church of St. James the Great, North London, September 2007 - the first convocation of this unexpected quartet crossing different generations and playing styles. Max Eastley (arc - electro-acoustic monochord), Graham Halliwell (computer & electronics), Evan Parker (soprano saxophone) and Mark Wastell (tam-tam, metal percussion & harmonium) document a meeting of three generations of London free improvisation.

Parker has had a venerable presence as both musician and organizer for four decades. Eastley was part of a second generation of improvisers like David Toop and Paul Burwell who started playing in the mid-'70s, bringing home-made instruments and notions of kinetic sound installations and interactive electronics to further subvert habitual responses in collective settings. Wastell and Halliwell have been at the forefront of a more recent generation looking to further extend collective interactions through concentrated focus on minute details of technique, timbres, and densities.

The title references ancient Japanese folklore - track titles include "a carp gives a lesson in perseverance," "human fireflies," and "the chessboard cherry tree" - but there is nothing pictorial or impressionistic about this music. For much of its length, this delicately nuanced recording could quite easily be a formal electroacoustic composition, an impression strongly reinforced by the fact that Parker sounds curiously unfamiliar in this new grouping. He's well used to working with electronics, but in the full but not unduly resonant acoustic of St. James the Great, the four musicians move round one another with the gracious decorum and unfussy discipline of monks walking a prayer path.

As Michael Rosenstein noted in Cadence: "The three improvisations proceed with a sense of considered shimmering scrims." Eastley plays his unique electro-acoustic monochord - 'The Arc' - a single string stretched lengthwise across a long piece of wood (around ten feet) which can be played with bow, fingers or short glass rods, with a microphone attached so the basic sound can be amplified and processed. Halliwell deftly employs a combination of field recordings and live sampling. Parker's soprano produces his trademark fluttering, wavy, sinuous, hypnotic phrasing, but here more restrained, careful, fragile. Wastell offers subtle support on tam-tam, Japanese bowls and Indian harmonium.

Musicians principally concerned with electronic and electro-acoustic treatments construct a kind of dissolving backcloth, sometimes viscous but always substantial, which is tautened and sharpened by Parker in such a way that different layers are superimposed and interwoven to produce a dynamic and fascinating fabric. A shimmering, weightless music of unusual timbres featuring Parker as you've never heard him before and the welcome return of Eastley and his self-built arc to a group-playing situation. The result is economical yet intuitive improvisation - perfectly judged, yet alive in the moment.