While the cover is really classy and the fact many of the musicians on this label have a jazz/learned/contemporary background might bring forth the idea it’s soft-new age-jazz you can listen while having your macrobiotic meal, the music sails in much trouble waters. The fact all the music is played with clarinets, saxophones and trombone makes the listening not so comfortable above all if you consider this’ not "wallpaper jazz" and as you may suspect by yourself to avoid falling in the sad "innocuous jazz" category they needed ideas. Yes, they have ideas and they probably put it on paper while filling the blacks of the pentagram since the majority of the tracks are composed and by some means quite geometrically that makes it all interesting but on the other hand the side effect is that sometimes it’s really tortuous. As you can guess the recording is quite bright-clean like the majority of the other materials on Amirani but it gets rough just with some low registers and I say cause beside under the decisional profile it means in their compositions Novotono tried to explore every possible sound solution (according to their initial intentions, of course!). It would be easy and above all wrong to compare "wanderung" to the mighty Rova Quartet but let’s do it just to help you (and above all me) to describe further on this release. If compared to the historical releases of the Californians this one is forcedly less choral, more absorbed in abstraction but just here and there when they go for improvisational break in between written solutions. I’m tented to add Novotono sounds also sharper and colder that make me think to a lot of avant white jazzists like Time Berne (he’s not always cold I know shame on me!), Kyle Bruckmann or Scott Rosemberg just to mention some names you may know. I know "mr. know it all" is there complaining Braxton is whiter than the snow said that dear mr. "know it all" you will agree if you’re into horns dueling with contemporary music and above all into jazz trying not to be wall paper music, you’d better give a listen.