Sidsel Endresen is as impatient with the limitations of vocal chords and language as Coltrane became with his sax. ECM albums, art-rock singer David Sylvian's adoration, and a Kings Place packed with rapt Norwegian compatriots for a 2013 gig with turntablist Philip Jeck show her wide-ranging, if select, stature. She is also an exacting collaborator, so this second album with similarly questing guitarist Westerhus, after 2012's Didymoi Dreams, means their techniques are attuned. Improvising live in the studio, they had to be. If Endresen wasn't so committed to her vocal path, it could be dismissed as avant-garde arsing about. Instead her strangled desperation to expel sounds on ‘Ripped Silk’, and her alien growl on ‘Baton’, becoming a scraped-raw exhalation across chasms then a conversational murmur, is grippingly emotional. Her barely verbal language (with scattered, suggestive English) inevitably recalls primal forest fears and Aboriginal cultures. ‘Boom Boom’ shows her aptitude as a smoky-timbred torch-singer, the warmth behind her extended technique. Westerhus (a former Nils Petter Molvaer alumnus) similarly treats his guitars into unrecognisability. Sometimes jabbing to meet Endresen's thrusts, sometimes clanking in gloomy response, he cuts loose in shredded discord and scattershot laser-fire. The effect mixes a Tex Avery soundtrack with Nordic melancholy: playful, yet demanding unnerved attention.