Andrew Cronshaw might be described as 'a doyen of the spaces between', playing a richly spacious-sounding electric zither, the rippling harmonics of a huge Slovak fujara whistle, chiming marovantele (his own double-sided Finnish kantele/Malagasy marovany hybrid), the soft-toned Chinese brass-reeded wind instrument ba-wu, and other instruments from the shelf marked 'what is that?' With Tigran Aleksanyan, Armenian master of his country's heart-pausingly serene-sounding national instrument, the fat-reeded duduk, and the deep woody and soaring tones of Australia-based Ian Blake's bass clarinet and soprano sax, the trio makes wide-screen, atmospheric new music drawing deep on the traditions of Armenia, Finland, England, Gaelic Scotland, Galicia, Serbia and other parts of Europe.

Andrew's 9th CD "The Unbroken Surface Of Snow" (Cloud Valley, 2011) features all three of them (plus a contribution from Sanna Kurki-Suonio, singer in their quartet SANS)

www.cloudvalley.com/CVUnbroken.htm

Website: www.andrewcronshaw.com

From reviews of "The Unbroken Surface Of Snow":

"Delicate, haunting... glacial" - Robin Denselow, The Guardian

"This remarkable, quiet, haunting piece of folk art... The 34-minute title track is a Finnish creation myth set to a musical landscape that is as close to silence as a heavy snowfall, and more beautiful" - Tim Cumming, The Independent

"Stunningly beautiful" - Fiona Talkington, BBC Radio 3

"Absolutely exquisite" - Mary Ann Kennedy, BBC Radio Scotland / BBC Radio 3

"Sublime" - Max Reinhardt, BBC Radio 3

"Music of snowflake-like singularity" - Ken Hunt, fRoots

"A palpable sense of space and peace" - Norman Chalmers, Scotland on Sunday

"The music is sparse, glacial and utterly beautiful, with a wide, panoramic sense of infinite space; you will happily lose yourself again and again in the title track, a far northern wilderness transformed into sound" - Tim Cumming, Songlines