"Starkland's Immersion was the first DVD-A project released featuring works composed specifically for the new surround medium. The disc features 13 new music pieces from some of the world's most ambitious electroacoustic composers."
– Pro Sound News

“Very interesting, well realized and worthy of repeated listening”
– Sequenza21

"A number of 'firsts' in an exceptionally enjoyable program."
– Billboard

“Immersion” is recognized as a groundbreaking recording that allowed listeners to experience new music in high-resolution surround sound for the first time in history. Starkland commissioned Paul Dolden, Paul Dresher, Ellen Fullman, Phil Kline, Lukas Ligeti, Ingram Marshall, Merzbow, Meredith Monk, Bruce Odland, Pauline Oliveros, Maggi Payne, Carl Stone, and Pamela Z to create surround-sound pieces exclusively for this release.

“Breathtaking”
– Audiophile Audition

All the music involves you in ways never before possible. In the opening piece Live/Work, Pamela Z gives you a virtual surround tour of her studio with a precision previously unheard.

Bruce Odland's Tank places you in a huge water tank, where you hear Ron Miles' trumpet reverberating for up to 40 seconds, with an authenticity not possible in conventional stereo.

Maggi Payne's White Turbulence 2000 begins by putting you in the center of a dramatic circling pan of a convolved, thunderous airplane, and then adds highly processed water-based sounds. Concerning her return to surround sound, she says, "To be able to once again have more spatial control of the sound environment is exciting. To enter this more complete world allows one to more fully sculpt the space/experience dynamically over time."

"One of the best composers working in the country today" (Village Voice), Carl Stone shifts hyper-speed hallucinatory barrages from speaker to speaker in Luong Hai Ky Mi Gia. "The opportunity to make a piece using the medium of surround sound has allowed me to expand on some of the quadraphonic techniques that I often use in live performance."

Phil Kline's haunting piece, The Housatonic at Henry Street, is a "vision of enfolded time flowing through a place on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where successive waves of migrant humanity have overlapped for centuries. Background and foreground are blurred as street sounds are recorded, then mixed with 'musical' material from computer and tape." The result situates you in "an imaginary surrounding landscape in which past and present hang out together in asynchronous multitonal harmony." Kline, "a real original" (New York Times), notes that "by nature all of my works are surround sound pieces."

Ellen Fullman's work places you in real world/virtual spaces only possible via surround sound. Margaret Tuned the Radio In Between Two Stations is one of two pieces on “Immersion” using composer-created instruments. Since 1981 she has composed for her Long String Instrument, which uses strings nearly 100 feet long. Fullman comments, "It was thrilling to hear a recording, for the first time, that envelops the listener, mirroring the live experience of my instrument."

Paul Dresher also wrote his postminimalist work, Steel, for a unique instrument, the Quadrachord, which he co-invented. It has four 14-foot long steel strings, with electric bass pick-ups at both ends. He writes that "both ends of the strings are acoustically 'active,' making the Quadrachord's sound inherently spatial. Because of their length, the strings often vibrate sympathetically, imparting a remarkable reverberant quality. This aspect in particular inspired its use in this surround-sound composition."

Lukas Ligeti’s Propeller Island uses widely spaced playback speakers to explore polymetrics. He surrounds you with steel drums, West African balafons, and other percussion instruments in multiple tempos. Every time you listen, the beat elusively shifts and new rhythmic vantage points emerge and recede.

Pauline Oliveros’ Sayonara Sirenade: 20/21 draws on materials from a 1966 spatially-presented improvisation. "Extracting sounds from the old piece, I used today's software to create new tracks, adding placement and movement. The new piece reveals the depth of field that was missing since that first studio performance. The flatness of stereo became fullness in surround sound. Spatiality becomes the clarifying parameter in composition."

The winner of over twenty national and international awards, Canadian composer Paul Dolden has used the same working method for decades. After composing several hundred simultaneous musical parts, each part is then individually performed on an acoustic instrument, recorded, and mixed together with no (or very little) signal processing or electronic effects, allowing for new and complex polyrhythmic and microtonal tuning relationships as well as unique orchestrations and density possibilities that otherwise could never exist.

Likely the world’s leading Noise composer, Japan’s Masami Akita has released over 400 recordings under the name Merzbow. He comments, “2000 combines two stereo multiple noise loops (front and rear), transformed in real time by different pan effects, with a monaural subsonic bass loop and a high feedback loop. The work especially aims to create accidental Doppler crash effects from the sounds surrounding each other.”

Ingram Marshall's Sighs and Murmurs: A SeaSong, is based on his memories of an isolated, "austerely beautiful white farm house which sat like a shining beacon on this rough and tremulous coast" of Nova Scotia. "One's feeling of solitude was tempered by an underlying sense of souls, long departed, who had once dwelt there." You hear murmuring voices, a poignant piano melody, and sea sounds that evoke strangely familiar memories.

“Immersion” ends with Meredith Monk’s ethereal vocal work of shimmering, seamless vocal layers in a floating, enveloping space. She writes, "In Eclipse Variations I was interested in the idea of a new sound being revealed when another one disappears - a sonic equivalent of the light or glow coming from behind the shadow of the moon in an eclipse," noting that "the entrances and exits of the singers leave an aural residue which modifies the texture. In surround sound, the piece becomes a suspended ring of sound, with the voices moving across the space, colliding, leaning, and creating beats in the air."

Each work on “Immersion” is accompanied by 5-10 slides shown during playback. In addition to bios and notes from all the composers, the comprehensive 32-page booklet presents three separate Introductions from the following: leading new-music critic Kyle Gann; Tomlinson Holman, likely the world's foremost surround sound authority; and the CD's creator, commissioner, and producer, Thomas Steenland.

“Immersion” will play on regular DVD players, as well as audiophile DVD-Audio units. Mastered by Bob Ludwig, the release offers 5.1 surround mixes in both DVD-Audio and DVD-Video formats, as well as composer-supervised stereo mixes.

With all music commissioned exclusively for high-resolution surround sound, “Immersion” became the first such recording in history. Amazon called it “groundbreaking,” and “Immersion” was often the #1 best-selling DVD-Audio there.

“Very beautifully produced booklet.”
– American Record Guide

"Not only a fascinating array of musical innovation but a persuasive exploration of the possibilities of surround sound... The care that went into this disc is carried through to the stylish onscreen graphics [and] the excellent printed program notes."
– Sound & Vision