Over the course of five days on Seattle’s Mercer Island, where the noted billionaire Paul Allen lives, former California EAR Unit violinist Robin Lorentz taped Bhajan, four movements without pause she had commissioned from composer Nicholas Chase, in which her playing was augmented by his signal processing and programming treatments. With health issues having sidelined the violinist since 2007, Chase conceived Bhajan as physical therapy for his friend; the choice of a title referencing free-form Hindu devotional songs similar to ragas seemed natural given Chase’s work with free-range SoCal musical giants Morton Subotnick and Lucky Mosko, with Ziad Bunni at the Aleppo Conservatory of Arabic Classical Music, and with James Tenney and Pauline Oliveros, and indeed his own recent interest in yoga.

In fact, Bhajan was the composer’s first work shaped by his new understanding of the relationship between music and spirituality, and there is a feeling throughout of waiting for a response. Initially, Chase and Lorentz create a musical environment constructed with a vast inventory of electronic ear candy, like music that R2 D2 and C 3PO would be listening to over cocktails. Gradually, the delightfully tactile digital textures seem to become almost instrumental: a horn in the first movement, a hurdy-gurdy drone in the second.

The sci-fi ambience sets the stage for the full impact of Lorentz’s expressive, lyrical, rhapsodic virtuosity; and yet, at the end, after an extraordinary arc of pure sound has led to a celestial rainbow, there is still, as at the beginning, a sense of waiting.