Rob Luft is always travelling, and as he travels, he absorbs every kind of music in his path, creating hallucinogenic new worlds of sound as he goes. His core companions on this journey remain the same: Joe Wright, Joe Webb, Tom McCredie and Corrie Dick all share Luft’s panoptic vision.

He has also long understood the importance of developing and establishing his own instantly recognisable guitar sound, so while there are distant echoes of Metheny and Frisell, increasingly it’s Luft himself we hear. A case in point is the title track of this new album, his third, which starts out like a guitar trip beyond the Missouri sky, but ends up as a full-on band piece, in which everyone is a co-creator; or ‘Daylight Saving Time’, the track that follows, which begins with African-sounding riffs and evolves into something far more integrated but a lot stranger.

On ‘Endless Summer’, a tune that feels like a sublime journey across the desert, the melody is carried by Joe Wright’s saxophone and the wordless voice of Alice Zawadski, all kept afloat by the Amika string quartet. The North African vibe that permeates the album is nowhere more apparent than on ‘Lamma Bada Yatatharna’, complete with trippy guitar drones, Zawadzki’s Arabic violin, Byron Wallen’s fluttery trumpet and Joe Webb’s groovy Hammond organ. ‘Be Water, My Friend’ is a mini-suite, beginning with a snagging guitar figure in 7/4, briefly interrupted by a violin interlude and then resuming with Luft and Wright proclaiming the melody together in their signature style, before ending with a reworked reprise of the interlude.

Luft has already reached the point where his lush, melodic music sounds like no one else’s. It’s neither cautious nor introspective. Instead, it encourages us to look outwards, freed from time and place, to be continually inspired by curiosity and optimism. The whole album is a thrilling voyage of discovery.