by Sean Cooper
A sprawling, defyingly integrated work fashioned from bits of Chinese, country & western, pop, jazz, rock, and even Celtic musics. Shea's reliance on the sampler is less pronounced here, instead scoring dense, acutely musical numbers ably executed by John Zorn, Marc Ribot, Jim Pugliese, Zeena Parkins, Kato Hideki, and others. Based on a massive 16th-century allegorical text chronicling the journey of the Taoist priest Hsuan-Tsang from India to China.