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  Nico Muhly is a Juilliard-trained composer whose contemporary classical pieces are infused with the spirits of minimalists such as Reich, Riley and Glass.
  
  
  
  
  
  This second full-length release comprises three multi-section pieces revolving around the human voice. On the title track, hints and wisps of piano, celesta, harp and strings adorn quietly chattering voices in a manner akin to Reich: it’s like listening to a spider’s web being spun, a weightless, gossamer series of overlapping threads.
  
  
  
  
  
  Both “Wonders” and “The Only Tune” are sombre creations based on antique sources – the former using harpsichord, horns and swells of synth to illuminate old writings, the latter featuring Sam Amidon deconstructing a traditional murder ballad against droning organ and noise-collage. Weird, and intermittently wonderful.
  
  
  Andy Gill, The Independent, 09 May 2009
• When I was a cathedral chorister, my choir gave the first performances of much of John Tavener’s early work, back when he was truly out on the weirder fringe, and long before he arrived at the relative formalism of The Lamb and Song for Athene. At times, the score would invite us to sing pretty much what we liked, or the notes would so resemble ink flicked maniacally at the page that the results tended to be equally arbitrary. Nico Muhly, a New York-based American musician, evokes early Tavener here, among referencepoints that also include Radiohead, Björk, Ligeti and Glass. If Sigur Ros (see below) eschew conventional structure, they are like Westlife compared with Muhly. In a transfixing exploration of the sung voice’s possibilities, he draws on Icelandic myth, English folklore, 17th-century church politics and royal superstition. It is never less than fascinating. It’s also fairly odd.
  
  
  
  Dan Cairns, The Sunday Times