One of the oddest releases in the peerless Flying Dutchman catalogue, Human Music speaks both to [label founder] Bob Thiele’s bold, electic taste, and Don Cherry’s restless spirit and infinite flexibility.

Cherry’s partner here is the defiantly cerebral Jon Appleton (1939-2022), a pioneer in electro-acoustic music, who was one of the first American composers to experiment with electronics back in the early 1960s; later, he also helped develop the legendary Synclavier digital synth.

The music on this LP is uncompromisingly abstract – toe-tapping tunes are glaringly absent – but there’s a playfulness and delight in discovery which makes the four pieces here less forbidding than you might think. Ace/BGP’s reissue is well-mastered and authentically packaged, and is required listening to those with more outré tastes.