Yuganaut itself is already an unusually configured band. Rush handles MicroMoog, Fender Rhodes, trombone, double ocarina and assorted electronics, moving freely between acoustic breath and voltage; Tom Abbs shifts among bass, cello, violin, tuba and didgeridoo, effectively supplying low end, mid-range grit and brass resonance as needed; Geoff Mann holds down drums while adding cornet and banjo, folding melody, pulse and rough-hewn string texture into the mix. Into this polyglot instrumentation steps Mitchell, armed with flute, soprano and alto saxophones. Rather than simply placing him in the “guest soloist” slot, Four Ways treats his presence as a structural element: his lines can cut through the ensemble like a spine, evaporate into the swarm, or trigger the group to pivot into a new zone.

Recorded in the studio shortly after the Edgefest performance, the album catches the quartet in a state of heightened, post-concert alertness - the ideas already road-tested onstage but still volatile. Rush’s approach favours layered improvisation over head-solo-head form: pieces tend to emerge from a sound or gesture (a Moog pulse, a fragmentary horn figure, a scraped string) and grow outward, accumulating detail as each musician finds a complementary or antagonistic role. Mitchell, who has long treated instrumentation as a compositional parameter in itself, moves nimbly through the shifting ground. On flute, he can blend almost seamlessly with ocarina or bowed strings, colouring the music’s more atmospheric stretches; on soprano and alto, he brings the tart articulation and intervallic leaps that have defined his sound since the AACM’s earliest days, carving angular paths through dense textures.

One of the record’s distinguishing features is its timbral hybridity. The combination of MicroMoog and Rhodes with tuba, didgeridoo and banjo situates the group in a space where no single idiom dominates; echoes of free jazz, electric Miles, early electronic music, folk and chamber improvisation all flicker through without settling into genre markers. Mitchell’s presence intensifies that ambiguity. His phrasing can suggest the focused austerity of his solo records, the pointillism of the Art Ensemble, or the long-lined, motivic development of his more recent compositions, depending on how he chooses to respond to the group’s shifts. Yet even at its busiest, the music retains a sense of clarity: voices weave and separate, but each retains a distinct profile, making it possible to follow individual trajectories inside the larger swirl.

As the title implies, Four Ways is not just a meeting of three plus one, but a genuine four-way conversation. Rush, Abbs, Mann and Mitchell listen to one another with the kind of attentiveness that allows form to emerge without preplanning: crescendos feel earned, not imposed; silences arrive like collective decisions rather than accidents; sudden turns in mood or density register as shared impulses. The album stands as a snapshot of Mitchell in a particularly fertile late-career phase, extending his long-standing concern with exploratory instrumentation into a setting where electronics and unconventional acoustics are taken as givens. At the same time, it highlights Yuganaut as a flexible, inquisitive unit, capable of absorbing a major figure into its vocabulary without losing its own identity. The result is a recording that feels less like a one-off encounter than a fully formed chapter in an ongoing, quietly adventurous collaboration.