The Lativan Radio Choir in cosmic trance The Latvian Radio Choir has earned an enviable reputation among the virtuoso choirs today. The album 'Mythes Étoliés' contains both exiting new music from the Scandinavian/Baltic area and modern classics for a cappella choir. The main work on the recording is Thoresen's 'Mythes Étoilés', a large-scale, three-movement setting of a poem by Giacinto Scelsi, a mastepiece of similar importance to Olivier Messiaen"s 'Cinq Rechants' or Iannis Xenakis"s 'Nuits'. A modern classic of advanced choral repertoire is of course Ligeti's 'Lux Aeterna', known from Kubrick's '2001 - a space odyssey'. John Cage's beautiful and indeed radiant 'Four2' is structured around sustained, extremely long-held sound-continuums to which voices are added or subtracted, creating vibrant overtones and mysterious inner motion within the sounds. Vilums' work is a highly dramatic piece that seems to evoke the rituals of a remote primeval past, whereas Hillborg's piece has been described as 'cosmic trance music'. Tulev's music holds a mystical, incantatory dimension, striving to balance the expressionistic aspects of contemporary music with the sense of the eternal to be discovered in sacred music, as we hear it in his 'Tanto Gentile'.