Danish saxophonist, Lotte Anker, has assembled an international all-star cast of top-flight improvisers and contemporary classical performers to help realise this dense and complex suite, which investigates the idea of merging separate realities, in a couple of distinct ways. Firstly, on a practical level – and as the personnel indicates – it explores methods for bridging the two different musical worlds of improvisation and composition, of allowing individual voices the freedom to express themselves within the context of a written work. Sure enough, it's a challenge to discern where Anker's writing ends and the extemporisation takes off. Is the glacial, electronic feedback drone written? Or the jagged interplay between sax and drums? Or the tense interlude of austere viola? Secondly, on a thematic level, the work, which is named after a line from a poem by Borges, questions to what extent individual human consciousnesses can share the same reality, with Phil Minton's rich and sonorous spoken voice repeatedly quoting the Danish poet Ursula Andkjaer Olsen's meditations on “the sleeping and the awake”. In the end, the implication seems to be that, only by engaging in the communal enterprise of music making, can humans come close to a “common, higher reality”.