Back in 2019 the Elliot Galvin Trio recorded Modern Times live-mixed and cut direct to vinyl as ‘a quiet protest against the overproduced, changing world we live in’. Cut to 2025 and Galvin releases The Ruin, an electro-acoustic tone poem very much the product of intense laptop constructions. The continuity factor, however, is that negative understanding of change, albeit in a wider context: the album is a bleak soundtrack to his assertion that England ‘feels like a living ruin’. As such, paradoxically, it is a thing of beauty, Galvin’s judiciously chosen sonic materials including Ruth Goller’s distinctively ethereal voice as well as trademark bass sound, the Ligeti Quartet, Sebastian Rochford drumming empathetically and the haunting shakuhachi flute of Shabaka Hutchings. The latter features on 'High and Wide' in a duet with Galvin’s prepared piano, a rare moment of clarity among shape-shifting collages like the aural assault of 'As If By Weapons'. Another is the Early Music-evoking 'Giants Corrupted', though even that devolves into a harsher grating coda. Given this diversity there’s a strange integrity to The Ruin, reflecting Galvin’s clarity of purpose and musical vision in taking what looks like a promising new direction.