Keyboardist Beckwith's debut is a disarmingly dreamy suite, breaking down barriers between past and present over similarly borderless fusion sounds. The titular distance is between his London home and girlfriend in Canada, inspiring wider thoughts on division and its collapse.

Integration of the often-divisive vocoder is helped by Zoe Kyrpi's sweeter voice, interlaced too with soul-jazz Hammond on the likes of ‘Topimpa’. Analogue crackle, suggesting both vinyl needle-drops and trunk-call interference, good feelings and bad lines, links some tracks, and on ‘Retro Machines’, where Alex Hitchcock's balmy sax adds to gospel warmth, the mechanistic aspect is more 1970s Stevie Wonder than new digital dawn. Harry Pope's drums are textural as much as rhythmic, playing a crucial and shifting part in Beckwith's arrangements, from atmospheric, painterly splashes to drum‘n’bass drive. ‘Long Distance’ suggests Radiohead in its pensive then surging strings, its ambivalence rooted in dark cellos and cracking snares, while Beckwith's classical piano sprint on. Pink Floyd's ‘Money’ is an act of personal nostalgia, begun by Beckwith as a hard bop standard while Afrobeat dances around it. Bland drift isn't wholly avoided, but the emotionally convincing conceptual drive fusing this album's elements makes it a notable debut.