The double bass has always been close to Gavin Bryars' heart. His own instrument, it has also featured strongly in his music for other players - as in The Church Closest to the Sea, written for Mr McFall's Chamber and their bassist Rick Standley. Bryars' music straddles worlds: classical and jazz, composition and improvisation, the works on this disc moving between the lushly sensuous and the coolly laid-back as they meditate on geographical and emotional borderlands. Mr McFall's Chamber began in 1996 as a string quartet of players from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, which took to playing nightclubs in an attempt to woo a younger audience.Over the past 10 years the group has grown to include a pianist and bass player, as well as a succession of drummers, percussionists, singers and guest instrumentalists, and which plays a range of music from tango through jazz and rock to contemporary classical, taking in quite a lot besides. Recent projects include work the Big Tent Festival, Falkland, Fife in July.

"He allows you to witness new wonders in the sounds around you by approaching them from a completely new angle" Michael Ondaatje on Gavin Bryars

"I believe the group - in what it does, and in what it represents - is potentially the most important single development on the Scottish musical scene in a long time" The Herald, [on Mr McFall's Chamber]