Teji Ito was a film and theater composer best known for his work with his wife, the filmmaker Maya Deren, and the music he composed for productions by Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theater. Both of the scores he wrote for Deren's films, Meshes of the Afternoon (added posthumously) and The Very Eye of Night, are included here, as well as Axis Mundi for Christopher Hampton's dance theater work +Savages. Ito's compositional method involved the interlocking of several musical systems at once, primarily those of Asia, India, and Africa, while employing jazz improvisation wherever possible and the tonal studies of Western European classical music. For Meshes of the Afternoon, Ito uses an acoustic guitar, flute, cello, sho (Japanese mouth organ), and a koto, a Japanese zither. Creating long, even tones interspersed with percussive or semi-melodic environments, Ito manages to suspend time and fill in the spaces with texture and a distant, foreign tonal equanimity that reaches ever inward, looking through the screen, through the skin, and into the soul without once pressing too hard. In The Very Eye of Night, Ito takes a more percussive approach, moving through an expressionistic palette of clarinet and flute dialogues accented and penetrated by a sarong, a cousin of the metal gamelan, a wooden xylophone, and various other drums. Given that this was recorded in 1952, it is remarkable how deep and wide ranging the improvisation goes, instruments -- particularly the flutes and clarinets -- dialogue with one another first, and then, as if knowing how to carry themselves, invite the percussion instruments in to join the conversation. No instrument is separated from another in terms of territory or dominance, all are present -- though often at different times -- in the dialogue that is by turns visceral, elaborate, pastoral, and inquisitive. As for these two works -- no matter what the argument on whether music should or shouldn't have been added to Deren's film -- they compliment the nature of Deren's highly experimental and personally mysterious filmmaking well, offering a deeper glimpse at the screen rather than a closer listen to the music. It is only when the music is placed in its own context that its depth is revealed; on the screen it provides a limpid backdrop for the images. Finally, the mystic score of +Savages, Axis Mundi, for shells, Brazilian percussion, flutes, duck calls, African thumb piano, voices, shakers, whistles, didgeridoos, and more is the highest achievement Ito realized as a musician. Recorded in the year of his death in 1982, Axis Mundi is the musical story of a journey, of many journeys, of people through time and cultures who try to hold on to their spiritual centers while in migration and in miscegenation. The long droning figures presented by clarinets and aggressively overshadowed by the array of percussion instruments used in melodic passages as voices, and then voices as musical instruments, moaning, groaning, and spitting out notes, lines, and harmonic equations. The dialogue is with space and time, not with musical conjecture or resolution so everything is placed in the context of movement and duration, color and its disappearance. In fact, all melodic, chromatic, and harmonic questions are erased by rhythm and silence, erecting a palace of emptiness, waiting to be filled with the heart and soul of the world. As shamanistic as it is, Ito's Axis Mundi is a profound study in musicological science, bending, blending, and obliterating boundaries between cultures, musical considerations, and spiritual prejudices. This record is so necessary, so compelling, and so profound in its sonic and cultural implications, it's a tragedy it is not more widely available. For fans of improvised and or world music -- not to mention Deren's films -- Ito's music is as essential as water. ~ Thom Jurek, Rovi