At the 2011 Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton led a septet in his Composition No. 347+. That “+” in a Braxton title will usually be followed by a series of numbers indicating interpolated compositions, but in No. 347, one of the first works in a series called Echo Echo Mirror House, interpolation is almost unlimited. In addition to his or her instrument, each musician is armed with an iPod loaded with Braxton compositions from the past forty years, which are to be mixed, seemingly at random, into the performance. As strange as it was to witness the original hour-long performance, the CD is even more remarkable: the live musicians—among them, cornet-player Taylor Ho Bynum and guitarist Mary Halvorson, virtual constants in Braxton’s current ensembles—have now become the most recent layer in the dense web of the work, one in which absentee voices come to the fore with startling clarity. There are passages from one of Braxton’s voluminous piano works; pianist Geneviève Foccroulle reciting from the text of Composition 171; a tenor singing a passage from one of Braxton’s Trillium operas; Braxton’s bass saxophone blustering forth—although at the time of the 2011 Victoriaville show he played nothing lower than his alto; an alto saxophone emitting a high-pitched metallic scream that sounding more like James Fei than Braxton; and the opening bars of an early Braxton march sounding repeatedly. The work is dense with refracted and fragmented phrases and voices, mingling Braxton’s voluminous methodologies and associations in a conceptual orchestra that sounds like it’s playing backwards and forwards, blurring past and future, improvised and composed, conscious response and random intrusion. Each time you hear it, its shape changes and different details emerge.