Kali Trio are 10-year veterans of a Swiss scene focused on collective improvisation more than solos, with personal influences also cleaving to Norway’s electronica-inspired 1990s generation. The background of drummer Nicolas Stocker, who also plays in Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin, combines classical singer parents, urban Swiss drumming rituals, teenage awe at Tony Williams and a musical life split between Zurich and Oslo, suggesting specifically Swiss yet hybrid horizons.

This aptly titled second album sees piano trio instrumentation blur into prepared and treated parts, concerned less with melody than pure sound instantly processed and mixed by effects boards and engineer Manuel Egger. Drums, guitar and piano lose definition in miasmic, egoless music as rhythm, texture and atmosphere evolve through electronic circuits.

These are familiar processes by now, not the cyborg sci-fi they once seemed, and group personality and emotion stay strong. The band associate The Playful Abstrac t with the Japanese philosophy of ukiyo – a “floating world” growing from Buddhist ideas of non-attachment to the material plane.

The 3D vibrations in the sound-field of ‘Bendings’ and the cosmic steam engine seeming to chug through ‘Flux’ certainly defy physical gravity. The titular phantom perhaps resides in glimmers of Eastern beauty, in churning, syncopated e-kalimbas and Raphael Loher’s windchime-like piano on the limpid miniature ‘Eon’. ‘Cascading’ sees Urs Müller’s jittery, brittle funk guitar help to create its own jungle-like atmosphere before its skirls, slashes and distortion interact with fluttering pulses on ‘Mos٣’, prior to ‘Field’’s monumentally unfolding synth washes. Rather than removing them from organic, acoustic humanity, such intense abstraction proves meditative, as if the days of studio playing and mixing were a transformative retreat.