This recording is a result of Alpaca Ensemble’s close collaboration with two living composers – both write music that reflects on humanity’s place in a world profoundly greater than us.

In the first work on the recording, Karin Rehnqvist takes the listener into outer space, while on the last track Ellen Lindquist paints us a vast landscape.

Within Karin Rehnqvist’s music, esoterism, mythicism and tradition are fused together with modernism’s propensity for resistance and estrangement. At the same time, its dialogue with traditional music, liturgy, rituals and folklore and adherence to vocal musical practice, allows the music to break into open forms and address the listener very directly.

Ellen Lindquist’s music features individual instruments and parts merging into large, sonorous landscapes. The composer often works in tandem with other art forms such as dance, poetry, performance and music theatre. In these interdisciplinary constellations, her music is allowed to insist on what is particular to instrumental music compared to other art forms, on its abstract, permeable qualities, which those other disciplines can approach, but never really achieve.