As a former cabaret singer and actress on the silver screen with roles in the films of Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci, Monti's apparent inclinations for the dramatic held her in great stead on this beguiling 1974 recording orchestrated by avant-garde composer Alvin Curran. Intoning texts by radical poet Aldo Braibanti, her folkish enunciations trace the peripheries of an elvish musical theatre bathed in moonlight, describing a nocturnal patrol of exotic menageries brimming with wild creatures and mystical goings on. Free-jazz legend Steve Lacy waits in the wings, cultivating wistful soprano clarions, blandishing coos between farmyard chorales of cowbell and duck calls, as the verdant, tumbling arpeggios of Luca Balbo and Tony Ackerman evoke sleepwalks through the ancient woodland temples of Diana the forest queen, or a gnostic tiptoe around the bizarre burlesque of 15th century saga, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. This is music you could only imagine existing in the deepest dreams of esoteric artists/authors such as Leonora Carrington and Ithell Colquhoun. And yet, here it is.