With an extraordinary flair the album, ERA, demonstrates how to transcend centuries— reaching forward into uncertain futures through lead voices and expert mixings, mostly delivered in a nearly dead tongue, Latin. As if from some science fiction tale, verse appears on the inside of the CD cover:

When the children of Montsegur came down from the pog
The Sun had not yet returned day to the world.
On their pale faces could be seen the grief and sadness
Without faith they went.

Positing a sunless world places Eric Levi's masterful composition in direct juxtapositions to that world. The singers, a virtual choir, include lead voices such as: Guy Protheroe, Florence Dedam, Harriet Jay, Eric Gelson, and Murielle Lefebvre, lifting upwards into a powerful optimism, one based on the kind of inner assurance that could conceivably be absorbed by simply listening regularly to this album.

The final composition, Impera. my friend explains to me, evokes some huge or colossal sorrow—war perhaps. Since it has played first, I note how this piece takes what could otherwise seem monkish-choir-like material— a kind too often mucked by that awful pious piety—and underscores it with a gripping sensuous beat. What emerges, as a result, is a marriage of the body and the soul, of spirit charged with physicality.

The album's initial cut, Era, seems to portray a journey that can only be called stratospheric. It leads to heights undreamed about by those who never dream.

A most arresting piece, at least as my friend feels it and as he communicates that feeling, is called Enae Volare mezzo. Hints are heard of a beginner's experience on life's trail here, a rhythmic confidence expanding while on the march, a faith leaping towards the future, yet not any silly, naïve faith. This faith doesn't take its own existence for granted. Always at the ready, it is, should the face of calamity unveil its hideous contours.

In Mirror, the seventh cut, there's a journey along corridors from needed forgiveness to love and enjoyment.

As the fourth cut titled Mother played I asked my friend what it was he could hear—since his own mother lived far across the sea. "I will see her again," he replied in near solemnity, but with an evident appreciation. Both the stirring music and my friend's reaction to it made veritable tributes to the cause of nurturing.

For me, one of the more affecting pieces—as much for its almost spooky spirituality as for its wandering majesty—is called Cather Rhythm. There's an emphasis throughout this album on deep-going rhythm. There are beats that are hard to beat, in other words, as good to produce personal reflection as for night music to accompany — at first — inattentive company.

In Cather Rhythm—or the English language portion, anyway, one may interpret what's heard in many ways. But no matter how the interpretation works out, this inner-soul music, no doubt, is charged with an undeniable dignity.

Most importantly, the charge leads with that same dignity into the most fabulous—nay-- scintillating realms of the human imagination. ERA has been composed in part, no doubt, to inspire a listener's imagination almost interminably, and certainly joyfully, forcefully and creatively.

ERA is released by Mercury Records, a division of PolyGram