Painstakingly assembled from hours of ornithological field recordings, Jim Fassett's mind-boggling Symphony of the Birds forges a sweeping, densely complex orchestral tapestry of bird calls tape-manipulated to evoke the chirps and whistles of musique concrète. The album exists somewhere between the natural and artificial worlds, mixing, matching and mutating the sounds of avian life to forge an otherworldly but deeply musical interpretation of the symphonic idiom. Fassett's three-movement piece boasts an uncanny sense of space and atmosphere, and almost in spite of itself, Symphony of the Birds proves above all a profoundly human creation.