Listening to ‘You Can't Pin Joy Like A Moth', the second track on Astral Plains, there's a sense of wavelets lapping on a shoreline. Unhurried piano and bass, a faraway trumpet, gently passing sax, rhythmic pauses … it's spacious stuff, possibly reflecting the lakes of the Peace Flag Ensemble's Saskatchewan home. The next track references Canadian abstract minimalist painter Agnes Martin whose work was once described as “an essay in discretion on inward-ness and silence”. Again, the music unfolds as a delicate collaboration of piano, bass and trumpet, resolving to a (slightly) more insistent finish of tinkling electronic tranquility.

The band describe themselves as a free jazz collective, and while their music is improvisatory, it has a lot more structural discipline than that description suggests. Each number has a basic conventional chord structure, a regular time signature – albeit implied – and the music sticks to harmonic conventionality. Their 2021 debut album Noteland was compiled remotely, an improvised piano part being augmented track by track, but Astral Plains seems to have been more conventionally made, with guests including UK trumpeter Nick Walters. The result is a more consistently ambient music, perhaps influenced by contributing producer Michael Scott ‘Music For Listening’ Dawson. It's excellently suited for a shady hammock on a sunny day, probably dangerous for motorway driving.