"...Kip Hanrahan's evocative and hard-to-classify albums have always occupied some dimensional netherworld, just left of any easy idiomatic address, closer to the realm of dreams and cinema. ...[Piñero] is music with a sense of image and taste and, most of all, dripping with atmosphere..."
-Josef Woodward, Jazz Times

"...The spare, trumpet haunted soundtrack of "Piñero" is a model of Hanrahan's masterful production. Technique and technology combine to create a transparency through which the naked physicality of wood, brass, voice and skin reverberate with palpable immediacy. It reveals his multidimensional sensibility like a sculpture reveals the hand of a sculptor..."
-Peter McIlhinney, Style Weekly, Richmond, VA

"...Racily salsafied, dangerously episodic, eerily disembodied, with trumpets body piercing most ensembles, Piñero exudes the smoky grit of a talky, bata 'n' conga-driven Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud..."
-Fred Bouchard, Downbeat

"...Kip Hanrahan is one of the most consistent record producers still active, one of those visionary auteurs whose name in the small print guarantees a good listen... ..[Piñero's] the real deal... The 27 tracks cover a variety of soundscapes and grooves but there's a consistency of mood as we descend into Piñero's troubled world. The album cleverly reinvents several perennially engaging musics: noir atmospherics; Puerto Rican and Afro-Cuban groove fundamentals; Bitches Brew-era space music; Latin boogaloo... As a mix of narrative and world music, Piñero makes a good (if less commercial) companion piece to Ry Cooder's equally dazzling Chavez Ravine..."
-John L. Walters, The Guardian (London)

"...Because of both the quality of the musicians involved - Gomez, Gonzalez and Cardona are simply an outstanding rhythm section - and the emotional depth of Hanrahan's compositions, a sound world of very concrete dramatic power is created. What makes Hanrahan's music so fascinating is the fact that it is stamped by a complete authenticity with regard to it's negotiation of Afro-Cuban rhythms - the sonic core of the work to a large extent - yet it is equally defined by a somewhat shadowy, cooler sensibility that is wholly North American, wholly New York. This might be down to the fast-moving, episodic feel that the composer/producer brings to the proceedings as well as the sonic flair i.e. the wily deployment of trap drums amid percussion, twin pronged attack of electric and acoustic bass and above all the potent bursts of spoken word... All of which makes Hanrahan one the most imaginative of soundtrack composers. Leon Ichaso realized that and gave him the right movie to score..."
-Kevin Le Gendre

"...Hanrahan and his musicians (including Edsel Gomez, Steve Swallow, Peter Scherer etc) offer a succulent, atmospheric stew of avant Afro-Cuban jazz. ...The mood is half-lit, vaguely menacing; even when things are taken up a gear there's a resigned, world-weary air, amplified by [Benjamin] Bratt's occasional monologues. Groovy, sensual and a bit dangerous..."
-Peter Marsh, BBC

"...And so the music is New York and smart and sophisticated and dark and seedy and ebullient and tired and hard and sentimental, all at the same time. With a beat, always a beat, because New York is a city that lives to its rhythms... This is powerful music, the sort of sounds that bring visions both beautiful and troubling, music that needs no projector to create images, music that lives in your deepest dreams..."
-Jim Trageser, Turbula

"...One of the 10 Best of the Year (2004)..."
-Fernando Gonzalez, Jazziz