Kui Dong: Painted Lights

While a single album can only offer listeners a small aural glimpse of the output for most composers, previous discs devoted to the music of Kui Dong (b. 1966) have featured very varied programs, often to the point of teasing listeners into pondering at first exposure if the same person created all the music. The same is true for this current album, perhaps even more so. Yet repeated listenings to recordings of Kui Dong’s seemingly disparate pieces reveal common kinships even though they are often so stylistically contradictory.  Musicians need to move from one part of the performance area to another, creating various sonic clashes in so doing. Perhaps this is somehow an acoustic metaphor for her own personal journey from one side of the world to the other – Kui Dong’s music exists at the intersections between several different cultural traditions as they each had undergone significant transformations.