When Shabaka Hutchings jumped onstage and started wailing at a Soccer96 gig, The Comet Is Coming was born, creating the thrusting UK jazz scene’s sci-fi vanguard.

Prophesying apocalypse and rebirth via the promised comet like homegrown Sun Ras, they incidentally provided Hutchings’ most progressive context in his most prolific period, as his sax hit warp-drive with his electronic partners. Soccer96 maintained an occasional existence as a more antic, anarchic duo, especially live.

With the Comet permanently grounded by Shabaka, Soccer96’s Danalogue (aka Dan Leavers) has turned to another brass player, Cafe OTO curator Robyn Rocket (Robyn Steward). As Space Blanket’s name suggests, the mission this time is mellow and ambient, with Danalogue’s vintage synths and drum machines the digital body and the trumpet its adrift, analogue voice.

This new space age inevitably conjures the gloomy early 1980s majesty of Blade Runner and its Vangelis score, while the title track sees Tibetan Book of the Dead bird-cries crash in like multiversal Revolver revenants. Crackling synths span the stereo field like shuttles traversing cosmic dust.

If the plaintive trumpet at the heart of ‘Sonic Balm’, its elegiac prelude to ‘Grief and Gold Sparkles’ and hint of wah-wah on ‘Dimensional Collapse’ arguably update electric-era Miles Davis, then ‘I Saw You In A Dream’ faintly approaches Wayne Shorter’s otherworldly 1960s ballads, with its melodic arpeggios, dark orchestral synthesisers and vocal dying falls.

‘Field-ing’ meanwhile splices a sampled philosopher recalling childhood altered states with chords suggesting “Loaded”, Andy Weatherall’s anthemic rave-era production for Primal Scream. By its nature, this is an unmoored album, purposively lost in space.