“Being friends and admirers of each other’s work for a long time, electronic music composer / visual artist alva noto (Carsten Nicolai) and composer / voice-artist Blixa Bargeld (also known as singer of einstürzende neubauten and guitarist of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) decided to join forces to initiate a collaborative project in 2007.”

The group is made up primarily of soloists from the Orchestre de Paris, and although the booklet emphasises the democratic and collaborative nature of their work, they are conducted Dietrich Henschel. For the programme, Henschel has chosen the original version of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll as well as arrangements for small ensemble of Schubert's D.889 'Ständchen', Denza's 'Faniculì-Faniculà' and three waltzes by Johann Strauss II. All but one of the arrangmenents is by Arnold Schoenberg; Wein, Weib und Gesang is arranged by Alban Berg. A darkly sentimental postlude is provided by Erwin Stein's 1911 arrangement of Busoni's Berceuse élégiaque.

This is a big departure for Bob James, who interrupted his stream of smooth jazz projects to produce a lovely album of electronic transcriptions of pieces by the French Baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. As such, they fall squarely in the tradition of Wendy Carlos' realizations of Bach – and in their own way, they approach Carlos' achievements in their imaginative, tasteful selection of timbres.