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If you have listened to American composer and multi-instrumentalist Michael Pisaro before, you have already heard the elements he uses on The Middle of Life. The music consists of interwoven field recordings, sine waves, and played instruments (mostly his piano and electronics). But he has drawn another component, poetry, into the foreground. Pisaro has previously acknowledged the influence of verse upon on his work, most notably on "July Mountain," an effort to translate the Wallace Stevens poem of the same name into sound. But here he has threaded the spoken words of the Tyrolian author Oswald Egger into the music in a way that evades the specificity of speech without losing the potency of...