Live at Fire in the Valley is one of the best examples of improvised solo violin on disk, & it is a critical document of one of the finest free music improvisers in our midst.

Malcolm Goldstein has been obsessively working through extended violin sounding strategies since the early '60s. His proto-orchestral conceptions seem to imply the presence of ghostly parallel lines and buzzing counter patterns as he carves see-sawing folk melodies and abstract architectures from out of the air. While his feet are most firmly planted in the avant-classical field, he also draws on jazz theoreticians such as Ornette Coleman, who penned 'Trinity' especially for him. Live At Fire In The Valley combines some visceral free-sawing improvisations with some other semi-structured pieces and it's the more subtly directed of the pieces that work best. 'Configurations Of Darkness' is based on a haunting Bosnian folksong and Goldstein plays it as a threnody for the victims of genocide, tearing through it's folk-simple truths with savage, human sounding screams and wails. 'When The River Overflows' takes the piece Ornette wrote for him and resituates it in a pool of deep silence as Goldstein slowly circles, taking stabs at the guiding melody from countless different angles.