Seattle-raised reeds-player Andrew D'Angelo met saxophonist Chris Speed and drummer Jim Black in high school, and formed the Human Feel quartet with them and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel at Boston's New England Conservatory in 1987. That such a resourceful band should have mostly flourished below the jazz radar for so long is a testament to their conviction – as drummer Jim Black has recently said: “the four of us making music together is a necessity”. Another influence on the music is D'Angelo's long, but successful, confrontation with a brain tumour, which he has since observed brought a more reflective quality to his music. These four players take in their stride classical-contrapuntal delicacy, punk-jazz percussion drive, Tim Berne's rhythm-stretching music (Human Feel were contemporaneous New York downtowners) and in D'Angelo's case a hauntingly Albert Ayler-esque quiver in the intonation. The captivating ‘Alar Vome’ moves from solemn multi-reeds polyphony to heavy-hitting jamming and sax/guitar melody-chases; ‘Imaginary Friend’ mixes the fluid, the robotic, and the grittily free-jazzy in a Berne-like way; ‘G.D’ opens unaccompanied with lovely, trembling alto reflections; ‘Strina Blues’ is a crunchingly riffy rocker; ‘Lights Out’ lays squealy dissonant sax over bleepy electronics; ‘Numer’ a teasing stop-start game that ignites bursts of battering improv and pensive hoverings and ‘Ology’ is like a scale-exercise that eventually whistles and echoes like Morricone's spaghetti-western music reworked for a sci-fi thriller. This is often fierce and uncompromising music, but its storytelling shapes are irresistably evident.