An Enticing Release from Emily Duncan and Randall Woolf

A new set of songs from Emily Duncan and Randall Woolf brings together the gorgeous textures of flute, piano, violin, cello, and more, all put together with elements of narration that tell intimate stories and pull the listener in with orchestrated and beautifully woven arrangements that come through with a heavy-handed intrigue and subtle undertone.

The record opens up with "everything is green", which is a beautiful piece of music that brings together piano, flute, and vocals along with that narration.

As the piece unfolds, you get pulled into this world and story, listening to the narration but also feeling the mood that the flute and piano set as the tonalities are warm, acoustic, and somehow welcoming.

This was a beautiful piece of music, especially to open the record with, because you get pulled into it quite easily, and once you are embedded in this atmosphere, you don't want to leave it.

I feel like that's part of what makes this whole thing so special.

It surrounds you and sort of swallows you up, but in a good way.

I adore any pieces of music that let you escape into someone else's world, and this is a perfect example of exactly that.

The second piece is called "scott somebody".

This piece of music focuses a lot more on just the flute, at times bringing layers of the instrument together to create different moods and settings, all while you have samples of narration throughout its course.

What's beautiful to me about this track is that it's a piece dedicated to a person named Scott Johnson, and I'm assuming those samples are from him.

As the song plays through you get the tenderness and emotional backbone that pushes through, especially towards the second half of the song when things can feel slightly more sullen at times, but still have that brightness or light at the end of the tunnel.

This is a song that invites you in a sense. It lets you know that you can float alongside the tones you're hearing and the beautiful tonality of the flute, along with its intense performances, really sound amazing when layered the way that she does it.

Emily Duncan is the flutist on the record and certainly doesn't hold much back in the way of expanding the instrument's capabilities and utilizing it to express that emotion.

Probably the most intriguing and alluring track on the record is its closing one called "native tongues", as the song lends a hand to all kinds of different approaches wrapped up into one piece of music.

You have a beatbox, mouthed beat providing the backbone and percussion of the track, and gorgeous stringed instruments like viola, violin, and cello, along with bass, all involved in this track alone.

This was outside the box from the rest of the record, but if you really listen to it all the way through, each track has its own aesthetic.

This piece in particular has a little swagger to it. It's got Jive, Jazz undertones, and showcases other sides to Emily's Inspirations and performance.

I love hearing this one because I just wasn't expecting it, and it came together amazingly.

The performers throughout the record include Drake Driscoll on cello, Jay Julio on viola, Jocelyn Zhu on violin, and Catherine Kyu Heon Kim, who also performs violin. 

Tyler Vittoria performs bass, Kathleen Supove on piano, Rinde Eckert doing narration, and includes conductor Zach Nicely, among others.

Altogether this was absolutely gorgeous and takes you on quite a musical Journey with each piece.

Dive into this record as soon as you can and let it take you where it will.

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