Ignore the off-putting title - this limpid album of solo piano (with occasional cello and Dulcitone embellishments) is an immediately rewarding listen that only improves with repeated plays. Apparently drawn together from notebook sketches, out-takes and experimental revisitings there is nonetheless a clear consistency to the album, largely due to Matthew Bourne’s well-established aesthetic of expressive economy. Whether improvising or playing prepared composition, the weighted timing and harmonic precision of his music generates emotional expression from quite simple elements. His use of the pause or a single note slipped in between a series of plangent chords, somehow convey an explicit human subtext.

The first half of ‘The Mirror And Its Fragments’, for example, is merely a slowly see-sawing cello part until a harshly tinkling piano scatters despairingly across it. Inspired by Andersen’s dark fairy tale The Snow Queen, itself a metaphor for depression, the short track needs nothing more to make the same point. It is followed contrastingly by the gently celebratory ‘Only When It Is’, dedicated to Leeds College of Music tutor Bill Kinghorn, an early mentor of Bourne’s. The album ends powerfully with a heart-wrenching tribute to his inspirational later mentor (and, all-too briefly, playing partner) Keith Tippett, appropriately titled ‘Dedicated To You Because You Were Listening’. Leaden, heavyweight chords spaced with echoing pauses emphasising the resonating strings create an achingly sad beauty that becomes angrily forceful then subsides into exhausted resolution. It’s an epitome of grieving that warrants being scored and published for wider performance, though few players could (or maybe should) attempt to match Bourne’s delicate sureness of touch.