When Blair Mackay, the Artistic Director of the Evergreen Club Gamelan, asked me to compose a new work for gamelan and string quartet, I was first pleased, but soon intrigued, and then almost worried about how to combine these two unlike groups of instruments. It’s an ‘oil and water’ situation that was very challenging to think about. In the end, I tried to place the two groups alongside each other, allowing for a kind of transparency between them – to hear through from one group to the other – like two trees whose trunks are separate, but whose uppermost branches become interlaced. The piece was commissioned by the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan through the generosity of the Ontario Arts Council, and is dedicated to the musicians of the Evergreen Club and the SuperNova Quartet.