Antipodean guitar wizard and songwriter Ed Kuepper is best-known for fronting punk and rock groups such as the Saints, the Laughing Clowns and The Aints, as well as enjoying a long and fruitful solo career. However the writer and singer of that touchstone 1970s Aussie punk anthem, ‘(I'm) Stranded’ has also long harboured an interest in jazz and improvised music. It seemed natural then, when Australian keyboardist Alister Spence, a key figure in the improv scene thanks to his collaborations with revered Japanese pianist Satoko Fujii, suggested a collaboration.

The result is the double CD outing, Asteroid Ekosystem, ‘a sonic trek into the extraterrestrial area of space debris between Mars and Jupiter’ according to the blurb. For once, that's not far off the mark, because the 15 improvisions here, spread across almost two hours, have a pleasingly cosmic quality to them, with Kuepper helping the trio create a kind of swirling celestial skronk.

Keupper (a skilled and oft-underrated guitarist) alternates between Trane-esque sheets of vaporous, almost luminescent noise (sometimes reminding one of a dancing aurora) and heavy, metallic squall. Spence's trio provide the flexible bedrock these sonic explorations require.

If you had to pin this album down, you might say it's what could happen if Pink Floyd (circa 1969, in their experimental ‘scrabbling around looking for a post-Syd direction’ phase) collided with an unfeasibly muscular version of the Bill Evans Trio. Glorious stuff.