Wade Matthews (software synthesis, manipulated field recordings) and Stéphane Rives (soprano saxophone) recorded these four pieces in Madrid in July 2008, creating music that speaks to transformation, identity, and the improviser's paradox. The album takes its name from Ovid's tale of Arethusa—a nymph fleeing the river god Alpheus who, in attempting to escape change, becomes water itself. As Matthews writes in his liner notes, "in her quest to remain herself, she has become exactly what she fled."

This mythological framework illuminates the duo's approach. Matthews observes that "change and identity are keys to any improviser's praxis, for change is the only constant, and improvising calls for a carefully weighed mix of action and reaction." The music embodies this philosophy—"improvisation is context-based art making and contexts are in constant change."

The opening track is particularly striking. Massimo Ricci in Temporary Fault describes "a painstaking vacillation of elevated pitches - some of them pretty smooth, other uneven – that initiates a series of natural glissandos and shrilling adjacencies whose near-incandescent vibrancy is essential for a thorough purging of the auricular conduits." The third piece extends the distance between events, featuring "imposingly resounding bumps and pulses, in turn eliciting subsonic ramifications amidst solid materials caressed by Rives' extemporaneous sibilance, mystifying harmonics, bumblebee buzzes and aborted honks. A ceremonial aura permeates this section, intermittently turning it into a quasi-paranormal experience."

Pierre Cécile in Le Son du Grisli notes the collaboration is "essentially a natural one, which plays with materials (wood especially), three of the four elements (water, earth and air), and with numerous silences." He describes the sound as "like the peaceful atmosphere of a corner of central Java, or like light being transcribed into musical notes which filter through to the deepest of underground spaces."

Boban Ristevski in Outlands captures the essence: "'Arethusa' is music in a state of becoming, disintegrated even before it achieves its full form... At the edge of existence... At the edge of presence... A sheer minimalistic beauty." Rives plays soprano saxophone in an unconventional way, "very minimal, sublime, mostly producing hissing sounds," while Matthews' electronics create "rumbles that intervene with the saxophone, also sublime and precise, dissolving into a hypnotic kind of atmosphere, putting you into a trance kind of mood, a primary state of being."

This is music about transformation as survival, about how identity persists not through resistance to change but through flowing with it. Essential listening for those drawn to the philosophical dimensions of electroacoustic improvisation.