". . . her 'sound art' . . . is celestial in its implications and down to earth in its reverence for everyday noises." --Kyle Gann, Village Voice

Excerpts from the liner notes by Tim Perkis:

Ellen Band’s work . . . lies in the path it takes, leading one from listening to recordings of natural sounds to, before one knows it, being immersed in a dense and complex field of sound which, though built completely from natural elements, is something quite transcendent and otherworldly.

Band’s music seduces us into perceiving the sensuous properties of familiar sounds by building dense and complex sound environments out of these elements. By sheer sensory density we are brought face-to-face with the physical, vibrational reality of sounds, bringing us to a state of attention to what we perhaps have lazily ignored through over-familiarity.

The ever-active yet somehow static nature of some of these pieces, as they reach very rich sonic densities, start opening like rich noise sources, providing a field for auditory illusion and hallucination. It’s as if our perceptual apparatus, brought to a high state of awareness by the odd combination of familiarity and extreme density, begins providing its own guesses about the meaning of it all --aural hallucinations.

Excerpts from the liner notes by Brenda Hutchinson:

At the end of each of Ellen Band's pieces, we return to the "real world" as it was heard in the beginning. The sounds are now full of memories with the residue of where they have been. It's hard to hear a simple, familiar sound again without imagining what it's "other life" is like.