Iyer and Smith have made music together for nearly two decades, frequently over the last several years as a duo, as on their award-winning recording A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (2016, ECM). Writing in The New Yorker, Alec Wilkinson described their music in this way: “[It] begins with Smith playing a bright rising phrase like a herald, that seems to announce a character’s taking the stage. What follows might be a two-figure play in which the exchanges involve mortality or impermanence or divinity. The musicians seem to trade remarks and sometimes talk along with one another […] Sometimes they appear to reflect on an exchange and sometimes they brood separately. The discourses are both cultivated and passionate.”