What started out as a William Hooker collaboration with mixologist DJ Olive at Slim's fortuitously expands to include west coast reedsman Glenn Spearman and something magical and enduring happens. Glenn sets it up with an opening that brings to mind lupine serenades to a waxing moon. Spearman's burled tone articulates the basic premise of Mindfulness: that studied involvement in the fullness of life is the central revelation of the human experience.

William rumbles in like the first gale of a brewing storm. His kit is vibrating like a bowed string -- shimmering masses of metal and taught drum that borrow the sweetness of a buzzing harmonium. Now Olive's palette of samples, waveforms, and records sketches a bright landscape in the midst of the storm. Olive can mimic the sound of herons fishing in the cattails. His cypher-copia of borrowed sound brims with aquatic noises -- humpback whales, tiger seals, and squawking gulls.

There's something warm and living in this "new" music that can often find itself dismissively relegated to the nihilistic urges of a postmodern aesthetic. "The cosmic warmth that heralds!" William cries out, seized by powerful intuitions that wrack his body. Hooker's art form is based on an honest surrender to powerful intuitions that must be mediated by a body that only has four limbs. As a drummer his playing is a paradox stretching the polyrhythmic concept to a point where he can point at time without having to stain his feet in its muck. Maybe Einstein would have told us that the natural offshoot of such vigorous timebending would be the production of new space.