With Floodplain, Kronos Quartet draws together work from the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Eastern Europe - in particular from those nations whose external conflicts and internal divisions have, for many westerners, often overshadowed their rich musical legacies. With these twelve specially commissioned tracks, Kronos Quartet explore centuries-old traditions while also presenting adventurous new music by young composers who sample and reinterpret aspects of their indigenous cultures. Some of these pieces have been adapted from the religious, folk, classical and popular music of Egypt, Lebanon, Azerbaijan and Iraq, among other places. Others were written for Kronos Quartet by such contemporary artists as the Palestinian electronic / hip hop collective Ramallah Underground, who Kronos founder David Harrington discovered via myspace, and the Serbian composer Aleksandra Vrebalov.

Over the course of the record, the work shifts in mood from the trance inducing and ecstatic to the austere and contemplative; it exhorts as often as it soothes. Vrebalov’s contribution, the mesmerizing ‘...hold me, neighbor, in this storm...’ embodies the musical, emotional and spiritual ideas that bond all of the material Kronos showcases here. Vrebalov’s piece, she says, “is a way to connect histories and places by unifying one of the most civilized sounds of Western classical music - that of the string quartet - with ethnic Balkan instruments... It is a way to piece together our identities fractured by centuries of intolerance...”

The arrangers and guest musicians working with Kronos gives Floodplain a cross-cultural frisson: Modern composer Osvaldo Golijov, raised in Argentina by Eastern European Jewish parents, arranges ‘Ya Habibi Ta’ala (My Love Come Quickly)’, a song popularized in the forties by the glamorous young Egyptian star Asmahan. American trombonist and composer Jacob Garchik arranges Ramallah Underground’s ‘Tashweesh’. Tanzanian visual-conceptual artist Walter Kitundu creates special instruments combining record players and strings for a piece inspired by Ethiopian musician Alemu Aga, a master of the lyre-like instrument called the begena. For their rendition of ‘Getme, Getme (Don’t Leave, Don’t Leave)’, an Azerbaijani folkloric love song Kronos brought to their San Francisco home-base an improvisational ensemble led by the legendary Alim Qasimov, world-renowned performer of the Azerbaijani music known as mugham. After Kronos performed pieces from Floodplain at London’s Barbican Centre last fall, the Evening Standard noted, “Kronos’s ears have always been open to extraordinary sounds of the world.”