Flutist Lindsey Goodman presents her second solo album, returning to heights unseen, the follow up to 2016’s reach through the sky. Goodman is a budding composer’s dream, interpreting new music with impeccable style and tenacity. 

Goodman grasps the listener’s attention right away with Roger Dannenberg’s Separation Logic for flute and live computer processing (2013). In this futuristic work, it is the listener’s responsibility to determine what is real and what is imagined as their ears are fed short melodic phrases that have been electronically manipulated. Every sound is crucial, even the echoes of the instrument’s keys clicking against their pads. 

It’s this sort of electronic genius that allows Goodman to play a duet with herself in the second track, David Stock’s A Wedding Prayer for two flutes (2004), stark and striking. In Tony Zilincik’s I Asked You for solo flute and mixed media, Goodman competes with samples of her own spoken text and percussion riffs in “Everything I Love”. “I Play Music” boasts a similar challenge, with the addition of an atmospheric modern synthesizer and ocean waves. The flute melody is a native chant of sorts, and its meditative nature immediately sends all other sounds to the background. Goodman demonstrates dexterous trills that rival the wing speed of a hummingbird.  

Elainie Lillios’s Sleep’s Undulating Tide for flute in C and live, interactive electroacoustics (2016) seems to be a continuation of the previous Zilincik track, until the entrance of a ghostly mezzo-soprano voice, the flutist’s herself. The listener is immediately transported into a dark tunnel or cave and can hear, but not see, many unidentifiable creatures of the night. 

Next is Linda Kernohan’s Demon/Daemon (2016), a performance art piece in which the flutist is both musician and actor seemingly possessed by an evil spirit. Randall Woolf’s The Line of Purples for flute and pre-recorded electronics (2015) is the least harmonically experimental of the works, but the most complex to categorize. It begins as a popular rock anthem before journeying into a classical idiom and back again. Roger Zahab’s suspicion of nakedness (2012), takes the listener on an emotional journey through tentative phrases of the flute melody interspersed with pauses, rhythmic anxiety, and hurriedness. This work ends abruptly to give way for Judith Shatin’s For the Fallen for amplified flute and electronics (2017). The fallen, in this case, are the fallen of all wars. Here, Goodman offers a moving tribute with the entire spectrum of possible flute sounds and colors against an electronic backdrop of dark chimes, pipes, gongs, and cymbals. 

This masterfully mixed album is a must-have for any new music or electronic music savant.