Alto saxophonist Caroline Kraabel and tenor/soprano saxophonist and flutist Phil Hargreaves recorded a number of duos together over the course of four years, in various acoustic spaces around Liverpool, England: St. George's Hall, Wallasey Tunnel at Picton Library, a street and alleyway near Penny Lane, an anechoic chamber at Liverpool University, a greenhouse on the Sefton Park Allotments, et cetera. Rather than presenting the recordings from each individual space as separate tracks on Where we Were, Kraabel and Hargreaves blended them together into a fifty-minute suite that shifts between acoustic environments. (For ease of listening, the suite is divided into four tracks, but these are not to be heard as discrete movements.)

Under ordinary circumstances, this might seem to be an exercise in sonic disconnect -- after all, changes in acoustics usually delineate radical shifts on most recordings, where producers fight feverishly to make all of the parts, even if they were recorded in disparate locations, sound like they came from "the same place", via studio gadgetry and reverb. Kraabel and Hargreaves have other designs. While their playing exhibits considerable freedom and improvisational ingenuity, the duo was also careful to include certain musical gestures, particularly long held intervals, in all of their recordings in the field. Later, these were used as musical "hinge points", allowing for a more fluid transition between acoustic environments.

These formal unifiers allow the listener to experience shifts of acoustic in an entirely different way. Instead of creating a disconnect, these changes of place become changes of timbre. Similar gestures, such as Hargreaves's soprano saxophone trills and Kraabel's single note crescendos, are given entirely different weight and resonance when played in various locales. Reverberant tunnels and bridges impart a wide sweep to the music, as well as an accumulation of echoing canons bouncing back. More intimate spaces, like street corners and alleys, yield the chatter of passersby, rendering Kraabel and Hargreaves, momentarily at least, as a sort of free improv street duo. The musicians occasionally lend their voices to the recording as well, testing the acoustics of a space with held notes and fragile melodies.

Despite a critic's best intentions, describing any sound recording with words offers at best a woefully incomplete sense of its content. This is particularly true of Where We Were. You really have to experience it yourself in order to comprehend the incredible aural journey crafted by Kraabel and Hargreaves -- and once you have, you'll never think about sound and space in the same way again.