Book & CDR

Suppadeneum, Arizona, August , 2025

Views from the Seven Ionian Islands is an exercise in patience, contemplation, and the shifting perspectives that accrue with time and distance. Slowly unfolding across 10 years and thousands of miles—shifting between Greece, Japan, Israel, and Paris—it takes multiple forms, each element in conversation with other voices, places, and moments.

Assembled in this release are two distinct but interlocking suites of music. The second of these—centered around a series of field recordings made a decade ago on the Greek island of Kythira, interwoven with instrumental interludes—was the first to be recorded. Here, it is preceded by a collection of lushly beautiful recordings made by Soloveitzik with a large ensemble in Jaffa in 2023, completed after revisiting and revising his impressions of Kythira in light of the intervening years.

The accompanying book includes two texts from Tom Soloveitzik, Impressions from the Islands and Views from the Seven Ionian Islands - Revised Version (2016-2023); an incisive essay on the work by the writer and composer Derek Baron; and a transcript of correspondence between Tom Soloveitzik and the painter Masha Zusman, who has made the island of Kythira her home for a number of years. Together, they reflect on questions of creativity, landscape, home, and what it means to record—in images, words, sound, and memory. A dozen full-color images of Zusman’s paintings illustrate their conversation.

As views proliferate and overlap, disparate perceptions and perspectives are superimposed. Views from the Seven Ionian Islands reveals a careful attention to the nuances that distinguish past from present, near from far, and memory from perception—and perhaps most importantly, the person one once was from the person one has become—but it retains a deep faith in the continuity between them. In a world increasingly characterized by a profound sense of dislocation—geographic, temporal, moral, aesthetic, and political—Soloveitzik’s work confirms his commitment to the enduring sense of connection to be found even in the midst of this shared displacement.