A musical prodigy from Boston, violinist Daniel Kobialka played Carnegie Hall at 15 and has since become one of the world's most distinguished violinists and lecturers on music theory. He collaborated with Zeta Instruments to create a unique instrument known as the Zeta polyphonic violin, which can produce an array of sounds and fill whole amphitheaters with its rich musical tone. It's an instrument Kobialka plays to great effect on the instrumental album Pathless Journey, an emotional and astonishingly spare work that combines classical and New Age styles with Zen minimalism and drifting classically oriented tonalities and tempos. Dedicated to avant-garde Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, the music of Pathless Journey grounds itself in the precision and economy of classical Japanese music while branching out on Takemitsu's "Sea of Tonality" conceptualizations. Instruments on the album include the mournful shakuhachi flute, biwa, and Kobialka on both his polyphonic violin and a hand-carved wood Italian model, which he uses to great effect in "Interlude: Watercolor A."
The soothing mix of flute and ambient drones on "Interlude: Watercolor L" holds long notes from a shakuhachi flute to create a sense of drifting stillness, one that has the power to stop people in their tracks and throw them into a higher level of perception with its quiet power. When Kobialka gets going with his special polyphonic violin, as on "Unfathomed Silence," where drones quietly emanate their way into the cracks between the silence and the business of your thoughts, he slows things down as the violin seems to become a cello, piano, or flute and then overflows into a vibration from which flows the deeply ancient sounds of the biwa.
A perfect album for music lovers looking to fan out into new directions while still ensuring their music is comforting and suitable to many moods and uses, Pathless Journey carries a clarifying cumulative effect, like returning from a full day at the spa, or a long meditation wherein you reached deep new levels of awareness. Kobialka's many talents and deep understanding of music aren't used to show off but to create vistas of the mind as stunning for their space and silence as for their ingenious instrumentation and blend of tonalities. Kobialka's Journey may be pathless, but it's sure-footed and never falters, even as its destination remains as enigmatically elusive as the strange and lovely dream we call existence.