Luening must have really liked his flute, because years later, when this was created, he was still using all flute for his recordings (at least I think it's all flute...) In this piece he uses some very similar elements to his earlier works. He still uses lots of layers of flute tracks, and has the difficult melody line over lots of held out harmonic background sort of stuff, but it sounds different somehow.
The difference is in sophistication of the technology. It's very obvious that this recording was done 16 years after the others, because Luening was able to do things with his music that were more complex. There were more sounds (probably meaning more tracks) and more reverb, but it sounded cleaner. The different tracks all blended together smoothly, and this allowed him to do some more complicated things. Also he incorporated some different colors with different flute lines, different tones. That was really nice. It was also great to be able to hear a melody line very clearly over the other lines while still being able to make those lines out clearly. This recording was haunting and beautiful. It's amazing what a difference advances in technology can make.
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