“When I work on a fresco by Ernest Pignon-Ernest or a photo by Guy Le Querrec, I’m dealing with a static image with its own unity,” Louis Sclavis has explained. “My aim is to bring out this image’s own latent movement and energy. I never illustrate the image I have in front of me. I try to reveal its internal, animating force.” Visual art is the spur for Sclavis’s musical inventions on Characters on a Wall, the French clarinettist’s second project devoted to the street art of Pignon-Ernest. The first was Napoli’s Walls in 2003, which responded to the French artist’s frescoes in the south Italian city. This latest work casts a wider net in terms of location, though sonically it gets definition from its carefully restricted chamber music-style set-up. ‘L’heure Pasolini’ takes life from a Pignon-Ernest image of the Italian filmmaker carrying his own body, Pietà-like, while ‘Darwich dans la ville’ has as its inspiration a picture of the Palestinian poet displayed in Ramallah. It’s an album full of atmosphere and invention.