The eight tracks on Insect Groove combine Sarah's performance on the sho, an ancient Japanese mouth organ found in the Japanese gagaku orchestra, with her own Max patches that she uses to access clusters of natural and mechanical samples. The recordings are, almost without exception, live performancesâ¹often in alternative performance settings. Some highlights include "White Powder/The Spiders" featuring David Toop's spoken word work from his text Exotica: fabricated soundscapes in a real world, alongside the sho work of Japanese virtuoso Ko Ishikawa (who is also featured on "Listen to the Sound of the Sun Sinking into the Lake.") Toop guests again in a somewhat different form on "Drillbit Skiploop", where a sample from a skipping CD of David's own recording Pink Noir provides the source material for Sarah's transformations. Jin Hi Kim guests on electrified komungo (a Korean zither dating from the fourth century) on the disc's title track. The resulting soundscapes are lively collections of the near-familiar, where radio broadcasts, insects, power tools, birds, and acoustic instruments live side-by-side in provocative harmony.
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