kronos quartet ya habibi ta'ala.wmv
ABOUT THIS ALBUM London's Evening Standard recently declared, "Kronos's ears have always been open to extraordinary sounds of the world." On Floodplain, the Quartet explores work from the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe with original arrangements of traditional music and newly commissioned pieces. There's vintage pop from Egypt, folk from Azerbaijan, electronica from a Palestinian music collective, and an ambitious piece from Serbian composer Aleksandra Vrebalov that has the contemplative grace of a Górecki masterwork. Floodplains are extremely fertile tracts of land that border rivers, and many have been settled for millennia. The album was inspired by the idea that floodplains—which are prone to devastating flooding—will experience new life after a catastrophe, just as cultures that undergo great difficulty will experience creative fertility. Kronos' artistic director and founder David Harrington says, "Floodplain was imagined and recorded during one era in American politics, and then released during a very different one. Our work is a continuously evolving interaction with the world we are a part of, and we are always trying to find ways to reflect what it means to be musicians today." As journalist Anastasia Tsioulcas writes in Floodplain's liner note, "Kronos Quartet has always been interested in exploring music of our time—not just work that is aesthetically current, or even necessarily contemporaneous with our era, but music that creates a <b>...</b>
