'Kullberg’s composition explores a liminal minimal space between spectralism, sound design and instrumental musique concrète, its haunting opening evoking the bleak beauty of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s barren soundscapes. Extended string techniques also punctuate the shifting sonic surfaces of Moody’s Mandala, where restless passages spark a cascade of chaotic outbursts. As with several other compositions on the album, Michaels is called upon to breathe, chatter and whistle while playing.

Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s Amethyst Sings inhabits more traditional cello territory, its opening arch-like lines yielding a fiery flamenco-like dance. If Amethyst Sings occupies the instrument’s centre ground, Zoë Martlew’s Inila skirts around its acoustical margins and interstices. Inspired by the composer’s trip to Effigy Mounds in Iowa – an ancient site filled with mysterious animal-shaped earth mounds – the work’s title means ‘quiet’ in the Lakȟótiyapi (Lakota) language. Inila captures the primordial essence of the Effigy Mounds by digging deep into the cello’s own timbral archaeology and uncovering hidden layers, its breath-like whispers and airy panpipe-like melodies hovering above the site’s holy ground like sacred shadow spirits.

Traditional and modern also rub shoulders in Kit Downes’s three-movement Kasei Valles, which lies somewhere between Bach’s Solo Suites and Gavin Bryars’s The South Downs, and Colin Alexander’s sweeping Towards the Flame, the latter building up in intensity throughout its four-movement cycle to an inexorable gallop that sweeps everything before it.

Michaels displays phenomenal control and uncommon understanding of the cello’s limitless capabilities throughout the album. Scarily impressive stuff from a musician who is rapidly establishing himself as the Sean Shibe of the cello world.'