Nate Wooley has spoken about the spirit of what he calls the ‘American weirdo’, backwoods pioneers like John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Cecil Taylor and Tony Conrad whose music materialised from apparently nowhere: “tradition, history, theory be dammed,” he says, and his latest album advances that lineage. This music is about an inner landscape inspired by natural phenomena so immeasurable and unfathomable that internalising it would be all but impossible – if it weren't for sound. Columbia Icefield refers to a vast network of interlinked glaciers in the Canadian Rockies, and Wooley's response becomes all the more powerful because it is achieved through musical structure, never by straightforward sound-painting. The album stutters into being with the two guitarists – Mary Halvorson and Susan Alcorn – outlining layered beats that gradually morph and change, the stirrings of a form mapped out. Only when the natural sound of Wooley's trumpet breaks through the texture, seven minutes into a 20-minute track, do you realise that some sounds, both electronic and acoustic, which have hitherto resisted classification, were the result of him shredding the molecules of conventional trumpet technique. Harmony coalesces around his trumpet, and the music zeroes in on its melodic heart. Chilly but always inviting, the album proceeds by trading always-evolving instrumental colour against structures that move glacially, to find an uneasy conclusion with a poetic expression of emptiness intoned by Ryan Sawyer as the music gradually disperses, as though rubbing itself out.