They came from the South, these crazy musicians, from sun-drenched cities in Italy and Spain; their inspired ideas spread through the continent like wildfire...

Yes, these were the musicians of the Seicento – the seventeenth century, a hundred years of artistic experimentation, nowadays consigned to the touchlines of musical history with the dismissive term ‘transitional’. Although the great baroque masters who followed have stood the test of time in a way that the madcap musicians of the Seicento would never achieve, the music of these early trailblazers can still infuse us today with the thrill of the unexpected.

And so the Wild Men take their leave, their musical detritus strewn across the hot, hazy landscape of the Mediterranean Seicento, waiting for a pair of crazed musicians from a future age to rediscover their riches...

Piers Adams is the modern day wild man of the recorder. His steadfast refusal to accept the natural limitations of his instrument has led the Washington Post to describe him as ‘superhuman’, and International Record Review to declare: ‘The things Adams does with his recorders defy the imagination.’ Innovations in recorder design – most recently the ‘Eagle Recorder’ featured widely on this album – have enabled Adams to expand the instrument’s repertoire to include every musical genre from renaissance to romantic to rock, and to astonish audiences with its expressive possibilities.