I'm quite sure that if you met Urs Peter Schneider by chance in the street, you would surmise he could have inspired the character of the old priest in Age Of Empires or you would associate his nice aspect to the cliched one of a hermit who decided to have a walk to buy a tinder for his pipe after centuries of studies in an abandoned tower in order to discover the secret language to access to mystical experiences. Jokes apart, this assumption could be partially true as this interesting collection of works that Swiss label Cubus released on the occasion of his 75th birthday includes many compositions with a plenty of open references to Christian mysticism, such as the quotations by German Domenican frier Henry Seuse in "Kreuze", a really bizarre ensemble that Schneider derived by turning the events of Good Friday into sound where besides the illusion of nails hammered into wood, all musical parameters got structured in the form of a cross, to the references to Meister Eckhard's "Granum Sinapis" on the impressive "Senkforn", even if the meaningful intersections that this interesting and almost unknown Swiss composer are wider by far; spirituality together with a certain sense of humor plays an important role to understand Schneider's wide repertory as well as the "semiotics" and the connection with language of his compositions. For instance there's a strong sense of humour in "Familie" (2010-2012), the composition which ends the first cd and a bizarre series he named "Vier Familien", in the triggering by means of a poem about animals by Franz Josef Czernin, or in the confused tangle of male and female tone combinations and in the choral octophony of "Androgyn". According to the explanation you will find on the booklet, "most of these productions do not content themselves with being a collection of various compositions; they are programmes that are composed right through, in which single pieces depend on each other and make up a whole cluster of meaning, comparable with the structures that are effective in single pieces of work.". This concept of composition should be constantly kept in mind in order to appreciate his variegated productions, as some moments of this collection (particularly of the second cd, which mainly includes ensembles), ranging from operettas to early electronics, quasi-algorithmic sequences to proto-drones, could sound quite boring or gibberish to untrained listeners.