Eleni Karaindrou wrote the score for Theo Angelopoulos's Ulysses' Gaze, the film that won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 1995. This ECM New Series recording, with violist Kim Kashkashian as the leading voice, presents the score as an album in its own right. A single melodic idea returns again and again in new colours, slow and elegiac.

It is the third ECM album of Karaindrou's music for her countryman. The first, Music for Films, drew mainly on the Trilogy of Silence (Voyage to Cythera, The Beekeeper, Landscape in the Mist). The second presented the score for The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991). In the film, Harvey Keitel plays a Greek director, known only as A, who crosses the Balkans in search of lost reels shot by the early film pioneers, the Manaki brothers. The music was recorded in December 1994 at Sound Studio in Athens. A string orchestra conducted by Lefteris Chalkiadakis joins Kashkashian, with oboe, accordion, trumpet, French horn, cello and the voice of Georgia Voulvi. Manfred Eicher produced and directed the recording.

Most of the seventeen tracks are statements and numbered variations of Ulysses' Theme, many under two minutes, so the album unfolds like a set of variations on one melody. A second melody, Woman's Theme, and two pieces called Litany give the cycle its contrasts. At the centre is a 17-minute sequence under the film's title, in which the themes pass through a Lento and a Largo before ending in a dance. Kashkashian's viola carries the melodic line throughout, which is why her name stands beside the composer's on the cover. Voulvi's wordless soprano adds one more colour to the small ensemble around the strings.

Karaindrou has described her search in simple terms. "I'm looking for the rhythm inside," she told David Sterritt of The Christian Science Monitor in 1996. Reviewing the album for MusicWeb International in 2002, Gary S. Dalkin found the score exceptionally repetitive but praised Kashkashian's "exquisitely subtle viola solo work". He added that "the musicianship is impeccable and the recorded sound pristine clean as an operating theatre".

This is the cassette edition of ECM New Series 1570, first released in September 1995.