This double album, strangely only released last year, features live recordings from the 2007 Asia Pacific Festival, in Wellington.
The huge cast of performers, including the NZ Symphony Orchestra, NZ Trio, Strike percussion group, and Contemporary Music Ensemble Korea, show a diversity in Asia-Pacific Rim music.
The nine-day festival of music combined with Asian partners was produced by Jack Body and recorded by Wayne Laird. New Zealand has a rapidly-growing Asian population, so there is an increasing Asian (as well as Maori) influence in home-grown music by composers such as Body, Garth Farr, Gao Ping and Ross Harris.
The 27 tracks contain examples of this, plus insights into old and new music from Asian countries. The NZSO plays some of Malaysian composer Adeline Wong's Synclastic Illuminations, Strike hits out in Japanese composer Naoko Kurauchi's Resurrection, and the NZ Trio performs Ross Harris' Senryu. Australian Vanessa Tomlinson has Bicycle Groove, which uses traditional and modified instruments as well as toys and objects to make sounds.
A more sonorous and exotic touch of the Orient comes from Yu Ko (Song of the Fisherman) by a Taiwanese composer played on zither-like seven-string instrument the Chinese gukin with 91 rich harmonics. Amazing sounds are heard from the Japanese singer Koichi Makigami in his own Vocal Improvisation on disc 2.
Many items are influenced by modern Western composers like Stravinsky - as in the NZSO playing a movement of Svara - Yantra, by Shirish Korde, a US composer of Indian descent. Joanna Kurkowicz (violin) and Sanjay Dixit (tabla) are the soloists.
Verdict: Interesting listening, best in small doses.