This new Swiss-Italian trio are signed to ECM and, appropriately enough, they make a very ECM-ish sound. Is that, one wonders, the inevitable result of the album being produced by Manfred Eicher, aka The ECM Sound Incarnate, or did Eicher sign them up because the guys in the band were already making an ECM-ish noise? It's a chicken-and-egg sort of question. Whatever the answer, this is a thoroughly engaging set, with the accent very much on texture and space. There are 16 tracks, mostly shortish, some approaching mere ‘fragment’ status (the series of ‘Improvisations’ scattered across the running order, for instance). All three members take writing credits, with drummer Emanuele Maniscalco, perhaps counterintuitively, contributing the lion's share of the tunes (that term shouldn't be taken to imply an overriding focus on melody in the playing, mind). The atmosphere is at its most brooding when guitarist Roberto Pianca goes in for a spot of fuzz and clangour (‘Furious Seasons’) and even a splash of beefy chug and distortion (‘Freeze’). But even when Pianca is striking a more Jim Hall-ish pose, it remains deeply moody stuff, with Nicolas Masson wrapping his reed around some prettily winding, tentatively melancholy lines (‘Miserere’).