**300 copies** "There have been quite a few releases of Antoine Beuger’s music over the past several years and it’s an odd, and very pleasurable thing to consider them en masse. On the one hand, his music is so diaphanous, so air-suffused that you’d think it might be difficult (not to mention unnecessary) to differentiate them mentally. On the other, they’re always very different. There’s that old AMM aphorism: “as alike or unalike as trees” that conveys something of my feelings about Beuger’s work. Now Is the Moment To Learn Hope is performed by the Extradition Ensemble (Loren Chasse, bell; Brandon Conway, classical guitar; Sage Fisher, harp; Matt Hannafin, bowed crotales; Branic Howard, bowed guitar; Evan Spracht, alto trombone). The listener is immediately immersed into the general environment fulling of falling water and clouds of ambient sound. The music is more forthright, kind of oozing through the space, a thicker liquid bleeding through a thinner one. Brief but forceful guitar and harp chords are offset by longer, more languid tones from the trombone, bowed guitar and crotales. The music, already rich at the start, seems to slowly intensify, though more likely it’s the listener’s aural acuity growing more and more perceptive as the piece unfurls. Car horns sound, engines; the bowed portions attain greater depth, denser sonority, though as on the earlier work, the music maintains a steady character, flowing and changing/remaining the same, traffic closing out the set. A moving, enveloping experience." - Just Outside

Loren Chasse : bell
Brandon Conway : classical guitar
Sage Fisher : harp
Matt Hannafin : bowed crotale
Branic Howard : bowed guitar
Evan Spacht : alto trombone
Now Is the Moment to Learn Hope was recorded and mastered by Branic Howard at the Portland Garment Factory, a woman-owned, certified zero-waste manufacturing studio in Portland, Oregon, USA. Production assistance by Robert Waldorf. The Extradition Ensemble is a fluid group of musicians associated with Portland’s Extradition Series, which presents programs of 20th- and 21st-century experimental music exploring purity, space, sound, and silence.