These important recordings represent some of the missing pieces in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble jigsaw that links their earliest recorded session Challenge (Eyemark, 1966) with Karyobin(Island, 1968). ‘Withdrawal’ was the proposed soundtrack for George Paul Solomos's aborted short film about drug addiction and the mental care system, while ‘Seeing Sounds And Hearing Colours’ was composed as a suite that had been influenced by Webern's ‘Five Pieces For Orchestra’. Both projects show just how far SME were willing to take their music, refusing to hold back and forever pushing forward into uncharted musical territory. Although the film ‘Withdrawal’ was seemingly never completed, the surviving tapes that make up its soundtrack indicate that it would have been ground breaking at the time. Made up of two parts (together with a series of fascinating sequences), it kicks off with Kenny Wheeler's perfectly paced and imaginatively sequenced trumpet, here sounding almost Miles Davis in its artistry as he confidently sets the mood for the rest of the composition. He is joined by Paul Rutherford's gruff trombone and Trevor Watts's elastic oboe playing, while in the background Barry Guy adds a suitably moody bass drone to the proceedings – with Stevens suddenly making his drum kit leap into action like a clockwork toy. The introduction and successive three movements that make up ‘Seeing Sounds And Hearing Colours’ reveal another side of the group's improvisational prowess, where a more orchestral approach is ushered in as they explore (under Stevens's direction) “specific musical textures, timbres and ‘colours’ in mind.”The resulting flow of musical ideas that emerge from the piece encompasses the very finest of what SME were capable of producing.