You can’t get much more contemporary than the singular drummer-composer Mark Guiliana. Yet he often seems contrary in his musical choices over the past decade, seesawing between religiously ‘live’ classic acoustic jazz-settings – albeit with sonic sensibilities centred on studio-music – and the improv-meets-electronic art-pop of his BEAT Music project. The new album titled MARK is a kind of DIY home-studio version of the latter, a release that adds to Guiliana’s fast-growing discography on the UK’s Edition label.

This time though, as the title seems to imply, he’s doing it all on his own using a small armoury of keyboards and tuned/untuned percussion. Whatever hat the impactful ex-Avishai Cohen drummer likes to wear at any time, aesthetic standards remain high and MARK is no exception. It has a melodic simplicity coupled with delicately nuanced layers of rhythm, meter and sonics, as befits an extraordinary percussionist who remodels beats from the ancient to the future in real-time.

‘Kamakura’ is typical with seductive ear-worm melody served by delightfully diverse, expressive key and percussive textures while the waltz-like ‘Costello’ sounds like a contemporary cutely electronic soundtrack theme to a quirky new American indie movie. ‘Hero Soup’ is an exhilarating piece of analogue-infused space-age techno-prog while ‘Alone’ seems to borrow harmonically from Radiohead, The Beatles, and to a certain extent revisits Mehliana, his striking 2014 jazztronica collaboration with Brad Mehldau.

He comes across fairly Eno-esque on the hypnotic ‘Motherland’, and hypnotically melodic percussive grooves and distorted gongs create an ominous backdrop to a Guiliana BEAT music staple of pre-recorded voice samples’ on the opening track ‘Just Listen’ - in this case one side of a conversation from a cell phone call urging a distracted artist to just open his ears and allow things to just happen. That might be good advice concerning this record, even though jazz and improv heads of the hardcore variety will probably still want to give it a wide berth.

Nevertheless, MARK should prove irresistible to those who also have an ear for Guiliana’s inspired work in this field.