Commissioned by the Hokuto International Music Festival

slink is a short but challenging work for shakuhachi quartet. The music consists of several lines continuously slinking in and out of each other’s paths to create a sinuous jumble. Labyrinthine passages give way to brief moments of relative clarity, only to meld back into a serpentine tangle. The soft, warm tone of the shakuhachi combined with chromatic sliding creates the characteristic color of the piece, a mysterious slithering of sound.