It's hard to speak sensibly about this rapturous recording. Elma shares with her husband, Brian Woodbury, an omnivorous ear for all styles and epochs of music, but their compositional styles couldn't be more different. Where Brian is a jester, Elma is searching and serious, though not without humour.

The song "The Green Shade" touches on the fact that Elma and Brian will someday return to their home by the sea in southern California. I'll miss them.

The Tide (excerpt)

This is the one song on the album that I play on. See Ponk's page for more sounds.

[These] uncategorizable songs ... are as engaging as pop, as complex as German lieder, and touch on jazz, 12-tone music, experimentalism, cabaret, and a few other things.

This Bucharest-born Brooklynite has a great new album of songs and cycles that draw on a century or two of art-music and pop traditions. I'm constantly drawn back to "Three Haiku vs. the Pet Gila Monster," the wry soundtrack for a monster movie imagined by a Japanese prisoner of a California internment camp.

This record, along with Brian Woodbury's, can be ordered from the Some Philharmonic site.