Altoist Maciej Obara’s third album on ECM sees him team up with his Polish-Norwegian quartet for their most persuasive statement so far. The title, Frozen Silence, is very ECM, as is the sound of the quartet, which coolly works through Obara's jagged yet fluid compositions.

The album loosely follows a programmatic scheme. Obara writes what he calls “reveries of the solo walker”: responses to nature, inspired by the dramatic landscapes of Poland. His wandering takes in his homeland, the Karkonosze region of south-west Poland, which informs the harsh, free ‘Dry Mountain’, the twinkly mid-point ‘High Stone’ and the dark and unstable ‘Black Cauldron’. (It’s interesting to compare the nature heard here with the smoother sounds of Scotland from fellow walker Fergus McCreadie.)

The quartet’s strength is their hyperactivity, consistently tiptoeing on the edge of togetherness (aided by Dominik Wania’s particularly strong contributions). Yet the high point of Frozen Silence is not a reverie, but something altogether more focused. The title track takes a single rhythmic idea and follows it through in extremely concentrated polyphonic development that sounds like an intense discussion among friends on a subject they’re all really keen on. A nourishing, wholesome record.