Ingrid Laubrock, the German-born, New York-based saxophonist and composer, set out a new marker for the lively relationship between contemporary orchestral music and jazz-rooted improvisation with Intakt's thoughtfully-titled 2018 release, Contemporary Chaos Practices. Now comes Dreamt Twice, Twice Dreamt, an adventure born of that encounter, in which Laubrock presents five pieces played in two versions - on CD1 by Cologne's EOS Chamber Orchestra plus improvising soloists, and on CD2 by the composer and the same improvisers operating as the Small Ensemble.

Laubrock has long been drawn to that shifting interface between through-composed music, jazz, and sound-bending experimentation, and this might be her most satisfying fusion of those volatile ingredients yet. The orchestral ‘Dreamt Twice' accelerates from pattering percussion, horn-blurts and Cory Smythe's tumbling free-piano whirls to big-ensemble chordal surges and back to pensively probing tenor sax reflections, and ‘Snorkel Cows' similarly emerges from torrential piano streams and skittering abstract sounds to sax reflections against soft strings glimmers. ‘I Never Liked That Guy' arrives in woodwind murmurs and isolated percussive chord-exclamations in the orchestral version, hovering piano trills and startled soprano sax outbursts in the Small Ensemble, while ‘Down The Mountain, Down The Mountain' is solemnly searching and deep orchestrally, electronically slithery and then tentatively and sometimes anxiously dreamy for the small group. Laubrock seems to be turning composition from improv vocabularies, and improv as outcrops of intricate written materials, into new languages with this impressive release.