Alan Brown: Encircle (Rattle Records)

Elsewhere has amassed quite a collection of reviews and such of Auckland keyboard player and sonic explorer Alan Brown.

We've reviewed albums, had a profile and he answered one of our jazz questionnaires.

That latter was because in addition to his recent ambient-cum-atmospheric albums he was in Blue Train, played with Nathan Haines and was part of the Grand Central Band.

But in the past decade he has blended electronic sounds with piano improvisations (and an instrument called the Ondes Martenot developed in France in the 1920s).

The result has been albums of melodic, often weightless, ambient music. His Composure (2018) and Murmur (2021) are appealing, aural downtime.

This new album works in that similar field and comes with a somewhat forbidding note that it “partly emerged through an exploratory process of improvisation centred on the interplay of contrasting sounds and textures inspired by generative audio systems”.

Set aside the method and sink into the mood: comforting atmospherics and sounds which glide past elegantly.

Only occasional ghosts in the machinery.

If that Sheehan/Liberman album Traces released at the same time is disturbing and disruptive here's the tranquil, calming counterpoint.

Another welcome entry in our Further Outwhere pages for albums which refer to nothing outside of themselves and experiment with pure sound beyond songs, ideas outside the obvious and possibilities far from pop. 

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This album is available from Rattle Records here.