Astral Spirits
2xLP
September 2020

Performed by Two-Way Street: Ashlee Booth, cello & Adam Lion, percussion

“…a supremely gentle piece…Reinvention offers a conversation of sorts in the tenderness of a shared space in which events are small scale - and that’s fine.” - Louise Gray, The Wire

“Once the romantic frame is in place, it becomes easy to see the core tenets of the piece—patience, the inexorable meshing of difficulty and beauty, the power of circumstance and change—as commentary on the daily experience of intimacy. Hennies utilizes space and silence to conjure a sense of intensity; it’s as if the two voices are drawn together instinctively, returning to one another again and again after periods of separation, searching for common ground.” - Jonathan Williger, Pitchfork Media

“The music is sporadic, but not without direction. Its ending emerges from a shroud of tension with radiance, glimmering with a newfound resonance as apprehension bubbles away. But as the piece reaches its final moments, anxiety begins to resurface. Those final, ascendant melodies remind us that rebirth is not devoid of its preceding states. As a whole, The Reinvention of Romance is an enveloping depiction of the undeniably human phenomenon of reinvention—one that uncovers the endless power of perception.” - Vanessa Ague, Tone Glow

“the piece creates opportunity for an intense emotional impact. There are moments of gripping acoustic phenomena: the overtone-rich drone duet around 20-minutes; the synthesizer-like ephemera of battuto harmonics on the cello around 45-minutes; the overwhelming, extraordinary 15-minute close. Sometimes, the departure of a player makes a huge impact—after an extended pizzicato line from Booth, where each note seemed more fragile than the last, the sudden space of isolated glockenspiel bowing was a shock.” - James May, The Road to Sound