Over a decade into their collaboration, tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman and pianist Matthew Shipp have achieved the important goal of creating a language of their own.

Their sounds and their sound – what they do as individuals and as a duo – are recognisable from the first note to the last.

Much of the interest Perelman and Shipp generate stems from an interesting approach to a perceived tonality-atonality divide, and to a large extent they have taken the notion of ‘in’n' out’ to a creative level that may well intrigue those who mooted it back in the 1960s, for at times they create the sweetest of consonance within the harshest of dissonance, straddling keys at will, finding new directions within new directions.

The players have sonic breadth to sustain the flow of ideas. Perelman’s horn moves seamlessly from hard, dry, vibrato-less solidity to sensual lightness, and Shipp has as much finesse in his seductively lopsided single note motifs as he does force in his on-the-beat bass. The net result is relentlessly probing, at times unsettling music that has a daggered romanticism full of contention rather than resolution.

Magical Incantation does not quite scale the same heights of some of the duo’s ‘classics’, namely the 2016’s fine Corpo, but it is nonetheless a worthwhile document of musicians who are admirably true to who they are and what the art of the improvisers can produce when artful improvisers take it to heart.