How do you make a solo piano sound more definitively solo, the act of running fingers up and down its keyboard a determinedly isolated otherworldly endeavour? One answer might be to add other sounds but to leave the association between the two aural sources unfixed, floating in space. In this super-ambient release from Jon Balke, his second solo disc for ECM (who else since atmosphere is such a key component?), the former Magnetic North Orchestra leader's keyboard forays are augmented by an array of field recordings which create ‘a subtle architecture of composed soundscapes’. Balke neither obviously plays with nor against these supplementary sounds; the two coexist, like the sounds from adjacent anechoic chambers accidentally streamed together: delicate, Nordic tone-tinged piano explorations of musical space underscored by what might be the sound of children at play in a school yard (on ‘Boodle’) or haunted by distant singing voices (on ‘Kantor’). It's a subtle, gently phantasmagorical experiment; the results could even be described as revealing what a piano sounds like when it dreams aloud.