The Latin title part-quotes Aristotle’s notion that “nature abhors a vacuum”, a suggestive phrase which helps Finnish singer-composer Selma Savolainen to explore music’s need to fill silence, and the period when her promising career tumbled into pandemic emptiness. That limbo saw internal dialogues with her late dad, the noted jazz pianist-composer Jarmo Savolainen (who recorded with Billy Hart and Dave Liebman). Delayed mourning and its resolution therefore inform this second album.

Savolainen grew up backstage at jazz gigs and in her dancer mother’s theatrical dressing-rooms, and Horror Vacui touches on Weimar-style cabaret drama as much as jazz-singing, as well as the fracturing extremes of grunge and Bjork’s early vaulting between girlish delicacy and explosive climax. The mid-album ‘Intro’’s 88-second symphonic shimmer confirms that, as Savolainen told Finnish Music Quarterly, “everything I have ever heard is a horizon of possibilities”.

Opener ‘Intense Ways to Recover’ starts with a vocal sigh over lonesome clarinet, and seems to rehearse that parental reunion; “I’m haunted by a dead man,” she adds on ‘Haunted’. The most seemingly traditional track here, a Jazz Age near-pastiche of Kurt Weill’s ‘Speak Low’, centres on Tomi Nikku’s expressly Beiderbecke-style solo, but secretes the album’s darkest lines, as time runs out on its lovers. “We’re late, darling we’re late,” she sings, death stalking their tryst. “Everything ends too soon…”

Billy Strayhorn’s ‘A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing’ sees Savolainen vocally step across a spare wasteland, musical emptiness imminent as piano, bass and drums pace a supportive half-step behind, till she rips into a jazz singer’s rasp. ‘Days of Suffering’ is a working musician’s confession of wear Jarmo surely felt too. Savolainen’s vocal fades into the ether, then the closing ‘Fear of the Empty’ lets go of lyrics. Impolite extremes sometimes obscure emotional potency, but Savolainen’s omnivorous style is bracing.