Unity and The Unexcelled Mantra were recorded with Harold Rosenbaum and the New York Virtuoso singers at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City. Both contemplate a path to transcendence or ‘true being’ through Union with the cosmos; The Unexcelled Mantra doing so from a Mahayana Buddhist point of view, and Unity from the Philosophical Tradition of Plato.

Unity is a choral piece based on some of the musical and philosophical concepts of Plato's Republic. When reading the Republic, the composer Christopher Bono was struck by the fascinating co-existence of profound and absurd ideas threaded throughout Plato’s work. The chosen text was taken from an area in the Republic when Plato discusses the power of mathematics, but from the composer's vantage point he immediately also saw it as a metaphor for the phenomenon of meditation as described in Vedic and Buddhist traditions. This multi-dimensional observation was a key inspiration for writing the work, both considering the mathematical qualities of music and the esoteric concepts of achieving union with the All. Like many other earlier composers, Christopher Bono was interested in Plato’s ideas about the sanctity of the musical modes. This led him to experiment with the power Plato claimed existed in the Dorian and Phrygian modes.