Matt Mitchell plays piano in Tim Berne's Snakeoil ensemble and clearly knows his leader's music inside out - which is how he plays it here. Førage knits together threads of consciousness by combining different aspects of Berne compositions. ‘CERBS’ reshapes the head of his ‘Not Sure’, which Mitchell then transforms into ‘OC/DC from Shadow Man; ‘CL0UD ’ sieves together two contrasting sections of ‘Spare Parts’ with material from Thin Ice’; and the whole album passes as a jumbled jigsaw of cut-and-paste structures made to function as the basis for improvisation. Anyone expecting the gnarly downtown soundworld of Berne's own groups might be left nonplussed. The virtuosic playing, and those techniques of reinventing borrowed sources, puts you in mind of the transcription tradition of Busoni and Liszt (and Mitchell also hat-tips Bach and Chopin); but in the dazzling independence of right and left hands and the music's rampant information overload traces of Andrew Hill, Borah Bergman and Marilyn Crispell are never far behind. The opening tracks, ‘PÆNË’ and ‘TRAÇĘŚ’, set out Mitchell's stall with delicate Debussy-like coils of sound which are followed by tangled, dense slabs of counterpoint that sound like Berne arranged György Ligeti or Michael Finnissy. ‘CL0UDE’ clocks in around the 13-minute mark and Mitchell's mastery of harmonic nuance guides a musical argument that evolves fleeting ideas towards a muscular, undulating summit. Tim Berne declares himself delighted at the results - “Matt might know my music even better than I do,” he says - and the sheer poetry of Mitchell's response to Berne is something very special.