From 2014. Double bass icon Barry Guy here with Norwegian saxophonist Torben Snekkestad, the title of the album gives a pretty hefty clue to the textural forces and fluid plasticity of the free improvising at work here spread across 13 highly abstract sometimes fraught pieces named after Norwegian and Irish islands: ‘Cruit’ at just six and a half minutes the longest piece.

The label, run by Guy’s violinist wife Maya Homburger who has also written a sleeve note, uses the metaphor of tectonic plates colliding with each other as one way of ‘seeing’ the music, and it’s an apt description whether or not the earth moves for you matters not a jot.

Recorded over a couple of days in Copenhagen during July 2011 there are quite a few moments of great clarity, for instance when Snekkestad breaks out for a blissful conversational episode on ‘Silda’ Guy’s rumblings and slitherings providing a kind of mysterious undergrowth that is quite absorbing. But there are also long passages that don’t seem to go anywhere but, still, there’s no small amount of pleasure to be had even in that inert holding sensation. SG