Bassist Yuriy Galkin lived in London for seven years having studied as a postgraduate at Royal Academy of Music, returning briefly to his Russian birthplace before finally relocating to New York at the start of 2017. Previous to leaving the UK, he recorded a freshly inventive nonet debut Nine of a Kind drawing on his growing reputation for post-Gil Evans large ensemble writing. It’s taken him eight years to go about recording a second album but … For its Beauty Alone continues the bassist’s rigorous, thoughtful methods of composition, though this time in a more sparsely textured acoustic quartet setting. It features a few leading architects of contemporary leftfield New York jazz, including the singular saxophonist David Binney, and embraces the scene’s cutting-edge fluidity across stylistic and compositional-improv borders. Galkin’s writing highlights angular, insistent vamps and cryptic harmonies although both the delightfully warm title ballad and swanky ‘Cradle Song’ cut through the album’s otherwise largely austere, dry tone, while the pianist Matt Mitchell on analogue Prophet 5 synthesiser conjures an understatedly eerie sci-fi-ish soundtrack ambience on a few tracks. On the whole it’s not an easy album to warm to, though every now and then, something beautifully enigmatic rises to the surface.