"Composer, pianist, and orchestra leader Eve Risser sends us greetings from the wilds ... Her expedition is a hypnotic journey dense with percussive attacks and mesmeric states ... The twelve piece Red Desert Orchestra is an extension of Risser's White Desert Orchestra, which gave us Les Deux Versants Se Regardent (Clean Feed, 2016). Here the influence of her Malian musicians is quite pronounced, with the additions of the balafon, djembe and bara percussive instruments ... The hypnotic pulse of "So (Horse In Bambara)" is populated by pops and beeps of synthesizers and an electric guitar that is accented by trumpet, trombone, and saxophone ... The music shares the same perspective as the Sun Ra Arkestra. "Soyayya" layers Ra's romanticism over a blanket of percussion, and "Gämse (Chamois In German)" applies the same kind of orchestral surge. While the impulse here comes from European jazz and West African music, the sound is inescapably universal"

"Med 11 medmusikanter (...) tar Risser oss med inn i et heftig og tøft, rytmisk landskap som fascinerer ... En spennende innspilling"

"The dream of an inclusivist orchestral music that stretches from one world to another in an act of embrace has been realized in varying ways by (...) Stravinsky, Milhaud, Ellington, Messiaen, George Russell, Terry Riley and Sun Ra. Few contemporaries, however, have conceptualized the passage as intriguingly as Eve Risser does here ... The Red Desert Orchestra is intimately connected with the sectional jazz orchestra, the improvisatory vitality of free jazz and the richly communal music of Mali ... The extended "Desert Rouge" includes Ostendorf's rough-hewn trumpet lines dancing through a field of rhythmic light generated by the balafons and the shifting figures of reeds and brass and voices, the textures and brightness reminiscent of the combination of minimalism and African percussion in the Mali version of Riley's "In C" ... Even in so striking a program, the concluding "Soyayya" stands out. Beginning in the sea of a comforting minimalist horn line (...), it eventually turns to the most memorable solo in the program: tenor saxophonist Sakina Abdou passes through warm melody to strangled, passionate squall with grace and reason, somehow both calm and electrifying, suggesting the recently passed Pharoah Sanders but in her own voice"