Broad Oak: Broad Oak (digital outlets)

Berlin-based expat Nigel Braddock -- who founded Monkey Records -- wasn't in a rush to get out this debut album as Broad Oak: it has been 23 years since he first started recording for it.

So no surprise then to hear it as a compendium of ideas and guest artists (from bands he recorded) which spans the decades.

However it is bound together by a couple of overriding approaches: a thoughtful quietude and his subtle electronic soundbeds.

The opener You Can Make It features the slightly haunting and angelic voice of Brooke Singer (French for Rabbits) on an affirming lyric and the opening sample comes from the late Sam Prebble recorded at a European street performance with Braddock where we hear “I've come all the way from New Zealand to play some songs for you”.

Now the songs come back the other way.

Singer appears alongside Braddock (a reluctant vocalist) on the equally optimistic Alles Wird Gud/All is Good (or if you prefer something more idiomatically Kiwi, “s'all good bro'.“) It's enjoyably quirky and fun as she sings in a near monotone over what sounds like a cheap Eighties computer game. Frogger, anyone?

That kind of left-field humour and melodic simplicity appears again on the forceful Not a Lemur with beats, a sweep of synth and speak-sing vocals by Mëstar (John White), a Kiwi name from the past.

And – reaching as far back as the early 2000s – here is the voice of Eightfold singer Chris McGregor on The Return which is in the category of “once heard, not forgotten”.

The gently throbbing Dante features Kingsley Melhuish on warped and echoed trumpet. It's a very cool seven minutes.

The lo-fi piano ballad Take Me Home (with a Ukrainian artist Make Like a Tree) has the elements of something interesting but never quite brings it home with any coherence.

Better are the angular Just a Clown (again you suspect bargain basement technology but quite fit for purpose behind his whispery vocals) and the seven and half minute, world music atmospherics of Pushkar at the end with tamboura, tabla, electronica and singer Tui Mamaki (whom he also recorded way back, I suspect this came from around the time of the Mamaku Project).

Braddock hasn't been lazy during the period this album took: he has released some EPs as Broad Oak (atmospheric ambience, cosmic too), five piano albums under his own name and appeared in these pages with his young son as Cosmo and the Cosmonaut.

But there is plenty on this left-field selection which invites repeat play and encouragement with “more like that please”.

Check out the pieces with Singer, Melhuish and Mamaki.

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You can hear this album on Spotify here