First attempt at a description: Can we hear red in the same way that we see red? A multitude of sounds lie brooding beneath the ashes of “Cities and Eyes”. The Skein play the music of prowlers; it’s troubling; it’s trouble. The music is imagined – not so much brought here as displaced; transfers of voice and noises, and there’s something else going on as well, in the background (or within): from all this sound comes music...  no, no, no, stop.

Second attempt at a description: There’s a room stocked with weapons. A flock of birds bursts into the weapons room and a cloud of fog forms in one of the corners, nowhere else. A multitude of sounds emanate from the mutated music, going still further… STOP!

Third attempt at a description: two women immersed in music dive for pearls. The voice of free-diving Jessica Constable (Julie Tippetts was her Fairy Godmother) and the compressed air cylinders of Andrea Parkins’ undulating machinery pushing out and tensing back; she refers to it as ‘electro multi-instrumentalism’. Improvisation is to set off the machines, springs and motors, noises crush each other, noises are sown into other noises, tinkling or booming into breakneck dropouts (there are air traps of silence), sea urchins of sound, subtle wringing out of rhythms, ‘sonic bacteria’, "between the stoic and the confrontational", as Nels Cline says in the cover notes. The voice doesn’t struggle: faded coral. It integrates perfectly into the circuits, making its own circuits, passing between a microphone that picks up and another that filters. One a reflection, the other a thought with few words.  A voice too full of voice to find satisfaction simply in singing or speaking. A voice that steals the cries never uttered. A voice ululating and bewitching the crowd. A voice to deafen sea monsters. How to become spectral? Asked Salvador Dali. And he replied:

"woman will become spectral by the disarticulation and the deformation  of her anatomy. the  body is the aspiration and the algid verification of feminine exhibitionism, which becomes furiously analytical, so that we can see each part in isolation, to delect them seperately, anatomies with claws, atmospheric and spectral like those of the spectral, clawed preying mantis."