New York-based Jessica Pavone has played on dates with William Parker, Wadada Leo Smith and Anthony Braxton, but jazz is only one element, and arguably an increasingly small one, inside her own music. In The Action is the latest in a series of improvised solo viola records in which Pavone has explored her relationship with her favoured instrument; that she was forced to abandon for a couple of years while recuperating from a back injury and which she once described as “larger than comfortable”. Though this new album, following on from Knuckle Under (2014) and Silent Spills (2016), runs for less than 30 minutes, Pavone packs in such a heavy turnover of psychoacoustic event that nobody is likely to feel shortchanged. The first piece, ‘Oscillatory Salt Transport’, is entirely characteristic of her work: oscillating chords, simple and folksy, run amok, making harmonies lose their acoustic bearings as they are swamped in chiming overtones. By the second and third tracks, ‘And Maybe In The End’ and ‘Look Out – Look Out – Look Out’, Pavone has extended her dialogue to incorporate electronics; delicate strums trigger a sequence of squishy electronic rebuttals in the second piece which, by the third, has migrated towards a hardcore wall-of-sound, built brick by brick. The concluding elegiac reel hiccups as it rewinds back through itself – an apparently simple gesture which, by design, is made to catch you unawares.