Guitarist Ian Brighton ended a nearly 40-year hiatus from music making in 2016 with a comeback performance at a fundraiser for Brighton Alternative Jazz Festival Since then, he's been adding to his formerly very sparse discography through a handful of well-considered collaborations such as 2017's transatlantic file-sharing exercise with US guitarist Henry Kaiser, Together Apart. These two sessions, recorded on the same day and with largely the same personnel, find him back in the studio with some former sparring partners from his 1970s heyday, including percussionist Trevor Taylor and violinist Philipp Wachsmann. There's certainly a high level of mutual understanding evident on the quartet date, Strings, as the participants sketch a micro-environment of small gestures, with Taylor's tuned percussion lending an air of mystery It's a spacious, meditative chamber improv with Brighton's subtly unobtrusive lunges and smears poking through the interstices On Imaginings, Brighton takes a more prominent role, allowing his stylistic debt to the late Derek Bailey to speak more clearly, as he piles up metallic scrapes and jangles with volume-pedal swells and sudden cleanly-struck notes, while Taylor adds rattling xylophone like a skeleton's ribcage from a 1920s animated cartoon. Let's hope Brighton doesn't take another 40 years off.