Since 2015, London venue Cafe OTO has run an in-house label called Otoroku, reissuing archival nuggets and releasing performances recorded live in the venue, as well as more experimental works. This latest tranche of releases casts light on three artists operating on the fringes of contemporary improvisation.

Billy Steiger's Loud Object presents two 20-minute pieces for solo violin. Insistent stridulations warp and morph, one moment strident, the next dropping away to delicate cicada-like chirruping. Subtle electronic augmentation is at work too and, at one point, a sample of birdsong and running water rises up to expand the sounds’ horizons. Yet, we’re always aware that this is one man exploring the physical properties of friction and harmonics. Apparently recorded in OTO after-hours between three and five in the morning, it conveys a suitably hushed, nocturnal vibe.

Strings are also at the heart of Ecka Mordecai's Promise & Illusion. On cuts like the title track, she shows an easy and instinctive ability to form gorgeous and transporting songs from little more than a plucked cello or harp and her own sensuous, wordless vocal extemporisations. Off-hand and unselfconscious, listening to them feels like eavesdropping on private moments of reflection and reverie. More abstract explorations of crisp violin twangs and tactile electronic crinkles accompanied by ghostly moans complete this beguiling patchwork of intimate vignettes and lullabies.

It's truly bewildering that, despite being a major presence on the European improv scene since the 1960s, through her work with Spontaneous Music Ensemble and elsewhere, Are You Ready? is vocalist Maggie Nicols’ first physical solo release. During Covid lockdown, she was invited to spend some time alone singing at the piano in a closed Cafe OTO and the result is a collection of songs, picked out at the keys from memory. There's a breath-taking vulnerability and honesty in these fragile performances as she finds her way through, stumbling, surging, making mistakes and incorporating it all playfully in the moment. Albert Ayler's ‘Music Is The Healing Force Of The Universe’ has never sounded so urgent.

The CD edition includes an extra disc, entitled Whatever Arises, containing 40 minutes of freely improvised meditations in which Nicols freely indulges in all her glorious idiosyncrasies, using overdubs to meld together spontaneous song, non-verbal tics and rambling anecdotes delivered in her mellow Scottish tones. It's as intoxicating, hilarious and comforting as an evening spent luxuriating by an open fire with your favourite eccentric matriarch.