Aki is Aki Takese, Alexander von Schlippenbach's fellow pianist and partner, and it was her suggestion that Schlippenbach might usefully think about an album that put aside the heat, intensity and high-speed sprint typical of free improvisation to ask questions instead about how slow can slow get before the music stops altogether.

Schlippenbach investigates this question, as much philosophical as musical, over twenty-one aphoristic improvisations that are hectic with silence and space. He also raises the intriguing possibility that the best way to acknowledge the all-seeing wisdom of Thelonious Monk might not be to play ‘Straight No Chaser’ or ‘Criss Cross’ but to ventriloquise fresh structures out of the Monkian base alchemy: and the music is correspondingly riddled with chromatically tumbling major 10ths and melodic ideas circling around note-clusters. The brevity and stillness of the individual pieces also brings inevitable comparisons with Webern and Schoenberg, but out of this pinched economy of means something unexpected happens. Schlippenbach implants seeds into your brain that flower inside your imagination, the music growing long after the disc has ended.