Together as half of experimental supergroup Warped Dreamer, Stian Westerhus and Teun Verbruggen reconnoitre offbeat realms where daredevil improvisation and caustic electronic abuse alternate between wraithlike ambience and bristling chaos.

Earthbound Monochrome charts similar terrain, with the duo embarking on a series of adventures in delirious abstraction, seemingly undaunted by musical convention. Impressive album opener ‘The Hickson Association’ festers in pools of prickly static before birthing an epic desert-baked Spaghetti Western theme, presaging convulsive passages where arch-axe manipulator Westerhus hopscotches wildly from twisted Mike Cooper-style Hawaiian slide to white noise doomsday. ‘Ursa’ is as bearish as its name suggests, while ‘Class B’’s hotwired hullabaloo wears the pair’s Supersilent connections less than lightly.

But it’s closing track ‘The False Cross’ which provides Earthbound Monochrome with its loftiest curio, as Westerhus and Verbruggen slam down the brakes long enough to posit their own minimalist response to Ives’ ‘The Unanswered Question’, a delightfully subtle coda to the preceding helter-skelter.