Pedal steel ace Susan Alcorn has single-handedly liberated her instrument from its traditional role in country music, recontextualising it as an exciting and versatile voice in free improvisation. Here she teams up with the experienced Portuguese pairing of Lencastre and Faustino on a largely aeriform session, with strings, brass and bass skulking stealthily like shadow pieces playing out a supernatural game of chess. But even at its most wraithlike, during the sumptuous crystalline glide of ‘Sombra’, or the Messiaen-style drone of ‘The Poet’ – the latter infiltrated by Lencastre’s mournful alto flutter – Alcorn ensures her music rises above the new-age ambient stasis which is the default mode of many contemporary pedal steel players. These initially pensive vistas detonate with frenzied bouts of hyperactive hopscotching and swooping slides, Faustino’s double-bass rumbling petulantly behind Alcorn’s skittish Morse code mischief on ‘Two Distant Realties’. Manifesto is testimony to the boundless creativity of an artist boldly stepping outside convention.