Drummer Tommy Crane moved to Montreal from a Sienna teaching sojourn days before lockdown. Creatively stocking up for the long hibernation to come, he rigged a spare room with synths and sensory, beat-transforming percussion, and hunkered down to make his solo debut.

Exploring wintry streets and relishing some prolonged time to think, Crane arrived at a maximalist ambient sound – grand like a Vangelis score, and layered in deep-pile synth luxury.

Mystifyingly for many of us who lived through it, the 1980s have replaced the 1960s as the decade yearned for by nostalgic youth, a decade experienced in economically depressed, oppressive grey remembered as a riot of optimistic colour. Blame it on Stranger Things or time's relentless generational grind, but crude synths abound in current music, arriving from a poignantly imperfect, analogue past.

The decade's capacity for futuristic nostalgia has actually been a constant, thin thread through this century's sounds, climaxing now. Crane makes it personal, accessing his late father's taste for ‘yacht rock’ on the even synth waves and padded bass of the thickly oceanic ‘Before We Sail Away’, and the elegiac ‘In Memoriam’; ‘Once I Was A Cohen’ reflects on his grandparents’ transformative voyage to America through a stately piano line's proud progress.

‘Keys to the Darkroom’ mines the prog-techno interface, hovering between 1980s Genesis and The Orb to reconstruct a euphoric rave dawn, while ‘Nordique Americana’ nods to ECM's cathedral ambience.

We're All Improvisers Now refers to Covid's dismantling of easy habits, and the need for jazz-like instincts to keep going. It's a memo from strange times: layered almost claustrophobically thick during lockdown's endless, empty hours, but with chords climbing towards a bright future.