KAL

Billed as a ‘companion piece’ to 2022's KALAK, which earned a Songlines Music Award for what we called its ‘urgent, widescreen, technicolour Indo-jazz sound paintings,’ KAL is not a collection of outtakes or remixes, but rather a prequel. The eight live improvised jams here laid the groundwork for the tracks that would form KALAK, and if you listen closely you will detect a cyclical rhythm here or a snatch of a melody there that were subsequently honed on that album. Yet at the same time it's also completely different, looser and rawer and full of a liberated energy that reflects that it was the first time the musicians – Tamar Osborn on sax and flute, Al MacSween and Danalogue on synths, percussionist Magnus Mehta, and Korwar on drums and electronics – had been able to play in the same room after months spent in lockdown. Try the nine-minute ‘A Seed Comes from a Plant’ with its cosmic Indo-futurist vibe, ‘People or Songs’ which riffs on the pulsating motif from Terry Riley's ‘A Rainbow in Curved Air’, or the sinuous percussive storm ‘A Root From a Tree’. Not essential but nevertheless fascinating.