On their second ECM duo album, Romanian pianist Lucian Ban and American violist Mat Maneri draw new inspiration by following in the footsteps of Béla Bartók and revisiting the folk music that fired the great Hungarian composer's imagination. The duo takes up numerous pieces that Bartók collected and transcribed in Transylvania in the early 20th century. For Maneri and Ban, these songs have become "springboards and sources of melodic material" for arrangements "that capture the spirit of the original and yet allow us to improvise and immerse them in our own world. When you delve deeper into the source material, new perspectives open up. These folk songs teach us a lot." The lectures, recorded live in October 2022 as part of the "Retracing Bartók" project in Timișoara, also testify to the finely tuned sensibility that Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri have developed in their long-standing musical partnership.