Adam Martin and Mark Slater AKA Nightports are an experimental studio production team currently recording a series of collaborations with UK improvising instrumentalists. It might be more accurate to say that they bring an extra sonic dimension to the notion of a solo recording with their treatment of a series of spontaneous improvs by each musician.

They previously hooked up with Comet is Coming drummer Betamax in 2018 and pianist Matthew Bourne in 2020. Now it’s the turn of Tom Herbert, a bassist who’s vigorous, cavernous sound was one half (alongside drummer Seb Rochford) of one of the last decade’s hip and successful young UK rhythm sections in Polar Bear, as well as playing in Dave Okumu’s similarly Mercury Prize shortlisted trio The Invisible among others. The third Nightports collaboration is a gentler, more ambient project than the previous two. Martin and Slater have set about this by manipulating and recreating elements of Herbert’s unedited spontaneous improvisations, creating fascinating, eerie juxtapositions of Herbert’s arco playing in particular. The resultant overdriven frequencies and electronica-like sounds occur alongside Herbert’s stealthy, ear-massaging plucked jazz-bass motifs and insistent alt-rock-y riffs, but they’re more subtly hypnotic than demonstrative, while additional percussion on the bass body imitates the sonic texture of a bass drum superbly at times. Reminiscent at times of the otherworldly sci-fi-like collaborations on film between director Werner Herzog and Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger, meaning it sounds closer to music for a hazy celestial dreamscape than a chill-out café soundtrack. But there’s also the delicately pulsating dancefloor throb of single ‘Arcs’ and ‘Hydrodynamica’. It’s hard to believe the electronica-like soundscape on the track ‘Vacancy’ is really just an acoustic bass at source, but that’s testament to the creative sleight of hand at work here.