The In Between is the debut solo album by harpist, composer, and sound artist Shelley Burgon. Burgon is one of the most accomplished and sought-after performers and collaborators in the world of avant-garde and new music. Her interpretations of works by composers such as Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, Morton Subotnick, and Cornelius Cardew, as well as her collaborations with artists as diverse as Bjork, Anthony Braxton, and Fred Frith, have shown her to be an artist with an extraordinary ability to get to the core of the music, surpassing the limitations of technical mastery with a transcendent sense of nuance and feel. Over the years, Burgon’s own compositions, including works for groups such as the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and The Ne(x)tworks ensemble featuring Joan LaBarbara, have demonstrated these intangible qualities with even greater clarity and shown her to be an artist with a deeply personal, spiritual vision.

The In Between is an immersive, meditative work in which Burgon’s subtle arrangement of space and seemingly simple melodic lines draws the listener into a deep awareness of the piece itself as well as the wider, vibrant sound world that we all inhabit. It was composed and performed by Burgon alone on her acoustic concert harp without amplification or effects and recorded live, in one take, as an early summer day gave way to dusk in the mountains overlooking the Ojai Valley in California. The continuous 56-minute piece unfolds as the sounds of songbirds and airplanes fade with the setting sun; the chirps of crickets and frogs slowly emerge; the wood of the auditorium roof crackles as it cools with the evening air.

The music is spacious, Burgon plays each note with a focus that is both tense and gentle, often allowing each to fully resonate and float before evaporating into the sounds of the surrounding chaparral and woodlands. At other moments, cascades of notes come into being, flowing with a ringing clarity and dissolving as quickly as they emerge from the mountain air. As motifs and figures repeat and evolve, Burgon's work becomes one of memory and foresight, a Feldman-esque unfurling realized as a sort of field recording in which the listener is both present and in between.