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• PREVIEW 22 February 2012
• PREVIEW 8 February 2012
• PREVIEW 8 February 2012

Haiku Songs Calling the Heavens Biomusique's The 10,000 Steps is haunting and soulful, full of delicately balanced atmospheres and Lisbeth Scott's impassioned vocals. Biomusique
The 10,000 Steps
(Kosmic) by John Diliberto You've heard the voice of Lisbeth Scott. You may have picked up on one of her solo singer-songwriter albums like Dove or heard her calling the heavens in gothic chants with State of Grace. But it's more likely you've encountered her in dozens of film soundtracks, including The Chronicles of Narnia, The Sixth Sense, Munich and the latest Indiana Jones film.

It's that side of Lisbeth Scott that turns up on the debut album of Biomusique, a collaboration with Greg Ellis. He's highly regarded as a percussionist who works in films and plays in settings as diverse as Billy Idol and Juno Reactor, and was the rhythm half of the Persian fusion duo Vas.

But with Lisbeth Scott, he's found a different kind of collaborator. Lisbeth brings a classical sensibility and a gentle feel to songs that read like haiku. The duo layer percussion, piano, guitars, dulcimer and even a bit of trumpet, getting a sound that defies categories, orchestrating their own, intimate chamber music spaces.

Each song is like a hymn. The opening "Ananda" finds Scott calling out passionately in despair and anguish. "Caeili et Terra" (Heaven & Earth) is a lament with Scott's voice stacked up in Enyaesque choirs.

"The Tender Green" mixes Ellis's tribal drums with Scott's layered, serene vocals, intoning "There is a world somewhere, way up high, way down deep." It builds to a slow, erotic throb that resolves to a tribal coda. Like a Rumi poem or an Abbess Hildegard von Bingen chant, Scott's spare lyrics can be heard as love poems or hymns to a higher spirit.

Greg Ellis has placed the instruments in a delicate balance that matches Scott's lyrics. On one song, Lisbeth Scott just sits down and plays piano in a pensive, Arvo Pärt-like meditation while Ellis blows some disarmingly affecting trumpet, like an elegy for Miles Davis.

Their name might sound like the product of a scientific gene splice or music created by plugging into plants, but Biomusique is much more about human souls than earth souls.