This album was recorded in the south of France last summer, but it would be misleading to say that it's the sound of Riviera sunshine, filled with lazy, languorous Mediterranean melodies. Quite the contrary. Drummer François Merville toured with Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble InterContemporain in the early 1990s, and the imprint of ‘challenging’ post-war classical music is very much in evidence here. Dominique Pifarély is an ECM regular who has worked with multi-reedist Louis Sclavis (on Les Violences de Rameau, for instance). All eight pieces were conceived by Pifarély and explore the space between composition and improvisation – which probably makes the disc sound like more of a straightahead jazz set than is appropriate. Pifarély is really a master of abstract textural environments: ‘Le regard to Lenz’ begins as something like deconstructed boogie-woogie for solo piano; ‘Vague 1’ rises to a screechy, buzzing crisis point before falling away into more subdued areas of sonic investigation.