Has anyone ever figured out why Canterbury-scene groups such as Soft Machine, Gong and National Health were so popular in France during the 1970s? Perhaps we’ll never have a definitive answer but, even so, it’s a cultural oddity that lends this cross-channel project a sense of historical inevitability. Here, London-based reedsman James Allsopp and keyboardist Kit Downes team up with two Frenchmen, percussionist Sylvain Darrifourcq and guitarist/cellist Adrien Dennefield, to create music with distinct echoes of classic English jazz-prog. Just listen to the second half of ‘Steam,’ for instance, with its subtly wrong-footing time signature and Downes’ spiralling organ figures, or the complex, Moebius-strip riff of the title track, and the comparison is obvious. But it’s not all that’s going on. Dennefield’s electric guitar melds a barbed post-punk bite with molten fusion fretwork, Darrifourcq deals in chopped, motorick machine rhythms and Allsopp’s bullfrog bass clarinet hints more than once at other abstract northern European improv. Vive la difference!