Vula Viel is a quest as much as a band: Bex Burch’s attempt to answer the fundamental human questions revealed by her time trying to master the xylophone-like Ghanaian gyil, and its place in the Dagaaba people’s rites. Burch’s remorselessly rigorous mind has examined her own less clear Yorkshire roots, and the fundamentals shared by atom-splitting physics and African music, which both describe a world built on asymmetry and space, motion and chaos. Her more jazz-minded bandmates have meanwhile found ways to connect with the gyil’s ceaseless, tethering minor pentatonic scale, as natural to Burch as 12-bar blues, but harmonic prison bars when you’re used to improvised freedom. This third Vula Viel album finds Burch, bassist Ruth Goller and drummer Jim Hart all usefully pulled out of shape. The gyil’s ritual certainty perhaps suits Burch’s driven focus, but here she moves more melodically, whether nudged by Goller’s fuzzed creep on ‘My Own Skin’, or Hart’s elastic rhythmic snap. ‘More Is More’’s ever ascending, never arriving mantra recalls the band’s joyfully shamanic live resemblance to The Doors, while Goller suggests Joy Division’s rough post-punk glower as the gyil presses on with sunny certainty. ‘Bird In Kumasi’ finds Vula Viel at their most mysterious, as slowly evaporating cymbal-splashes act as gauzy, parting veils into the thickened atmosphere of some other place reached through echoing antechambers. Elsewhere, codas of percussive dismantlement take care of the chaos in Burch’s cosmos. But as occasional lyrics confirm, this band is about bridging divides, beginning with their own.