Matthew Halsall’s ninth album’s title suggests, among other things, how his music incrementally morphs around a kernel of spiritual jazz, rhythmic repetition and the shifting human qualities of Manchester’s jazz community.

His sense of urban place was diverted this time by writing sessions in splendid isolation from Yorkshire to North Wales, as with the Anglesey field recordings ‘Tracing Nature’ and ‘Field of Vision’, where harp and intricate birdsong dreamily interweave. Inspiration struck at dawn or dusk, soaked up for later Manchester studio sessions.

Halsall’s unified, visionary state stretched to Sara Kelly’s tapestries on the sleeve. “I always had this idea of art in nature,” he says, “and the cover in a beautiful place that meant something to me, with earthy texture and energy. Without necessarily thinking this is all for An Ever Changing View, I was open and curious all the time.”

There are two contrasting, complementary layers to this music. Sampled and sequenced, dizzyingly diverse percussion is propulsive and mechanistic in its rattling beats. Kalimbas shimmer like shifting seashells on the title track’s airy spiritual funk, and meet their textural match in ‘Triangles in the Sky’’s eponymous, chordally similar instruments. Restless yet repetitive, drawing on electronic dance music yet retaining organic roots, this is the simmering sound-bed for Halsall’s trumpet and Chip Wickham and Matt Cliffe on sax and flute.

Halsall trades solos with Cliffe’s alto on ‘Calder Shapes’, the brass floating over the kalimbas, chimes and celeste, sent into gently liberated orbit by the subtly energised percussion, as Alice Roberts’ harp adds rippling 1970s grace notes. In Halsall’s jazz, the dancefloor and the meditative retreat merge in mutual rhythmic recognition.