This release from respected UK improvisers Mark Sanders and Chris Sharkey takes its name from a 1980 work of French philosophy called A Thousand Plateaus, which likens the world to a rhizome – a complex, sprawling structure with no clear centre – and which uses the relationship between an orchid and its pollinator, a wasp, as an example of symbiosis. Free improvisation has similar traits – both sprawling and collaborative – which Sanders and Sharkey explore in a single 50-minute piece, developed over a six-month residency in Leeds and recorded live at the 2018 Gateshead International Jazz Festival. It’s an engrossing listen, an expansive sound collage that weaves in everything from industrial buzzes, drones and glitches to a soulful vocal sample and corrosive guitar wails. It’s exploratory, but there’s a powerful sense of momentum that carries you right through. I particularly enjoyed the subtle interplay of acoustic and electronic sounds: the contrast of booming tom-toms and crisp, digital textures and the marriage of wiry, high-pitched guitar and delicate Indian cymbals. Ideas are exchanged and adapted at light speed. Sharkey and Sanders seem to think as one.