Released on composer/electronica artist Matthew Herbert's Accidental label, For Mario includes a selection of tracks by a trio from various Italian festival/club live dates from 2016 (a year that included one of the best gigs from the London Jazz Festival). Herbert, who's been more recently composing soundtracks for film and theatre besides his multi-media conceptual pieces, is in the business of manipulating ‘found sound’. In this case setting up a dialogue with Enrico Rava and his regular sideman Giovanni Guidi, both ECM pan-generational Italian recording artists, playing them back their own sampled improvisations metamorphosed into forceful, electronically-inflected, motorised rhythmic chants and eerily psychedelic textures. Herbert's advanced, highly musical methods of musique concrète create a daringly organic interaction with his collaborators. What distinguishes Herbert from any of his peers is his ability to converse with jazz musicians on the same level as a ‘realtime’ improvising musician rather than as backdrop; perhaps Leafcutter John is another electronica-based artist working at a similar level of collaboration at least, if with a very different sound palette. (Don't forget Jan Bang too! Ed). Through ‘Parts 1-5’, Herbert alternately frames and feeds Italian trumpet luminary Rava's Mediterranean-flavoured and eerily cinematic or more raspy electric-Miles phrasing, and Guidi's revolving key vamps or enigmatic melancholy in a hybrid that might set up an interface between Kraftwerk, Varese and Jon Hassell. The three-way dialogue is endlessly gripping even without the added spectacle of ‘live’ performance.