The founder of Windham Hill Records, Will Ackerman has stretched his sound occasionally with different instrumentation, but Hearing Voices is an entirely new approach. Picking up on his uncredited production of Samite's Stars to Share album, Ackerman enlists a group of singers that includes Samite, Happy Rhodes, Curtis King, and Heather Rankin to intone his quiet meditations, sometimes with English lyrics, other times with Native tongues and imaginary dialects. As a result, Hearing Voices has a hymnlike quality on tracks like "Somewhere in All This Green" and "Fear Not Mary." Rankin gets to do some ecstatic Gaelic chanting on "Walk with Me," which also features Ackerman's only electric guitar lead on record. Ackerman tosses in a couple of wistful acoustic guitar solos, but it's the vocal tunes that continue to haunt on this quietly daring departure. --John Diliberto