This three-CD reissue of the noted series of seven 10-inch vinyl EPs that Cold Blue released in the early 1980s (during the label’s short-lived initial incarnation) was a Gramophone magazine “Critic’s Choice” in 2004. Extraordinary music for violins and percussion, electric guitar, electronic keyboards with voices, solo and duo pianos, cello, pedal steel guitar, wind instruments of pre-Columbian design, readers, and more from composers Peter Garland, Rick Cox, Barney Childs, Read Miller, Michael Jon Fink, Daniel Lentz, and Chas Smith. John Schaefer, longtime producer of WNYC’s New Sounds called the series of 10-inch EPs “Cold Blue’s little ‘ism’-skirting discs…a whole wonderful world of new sounds.” (This boxed set includes a 24-page full-color booklet.) In Arts Journal, Kyle Gann wrote about the reissued set, “A new three-disc set reissued from the hip southern-California label Cold Blue has me so mesmerized I can hardly quit listening to it.” Josef Woodard writing in The Santa Barbara Independent declared the boxed set “Decidedly cool—in hipness quotient and emotional temperament. Beguiling.” Roger Thomas, writing in Int’l Record Review called the set “My favorite item this month . . . the work of composers whose work might be described as avant-garde but which also exhibited the back-to-fundamentals approach which is so often an aspect of the best American music…a striking set…. This spare, uncluttered music is a compelling listening experience, sounding as fresh today as when it originally appeared.” And Gramophone magazine wrote, “The sounds are spare, wistful, innocent and soft-spoken, often beautiful in a way no other music is.”