Album: Piano Magic

Writers Without Homes, 4AD

Since their first release in 1996, Piano Magic's constantly shifting line-up has apparently gone through more than 30 members. Writers Without Homes, their follow-up to last year's soundtrack to Bigas Luna's Son De Mar, adds a further battalion of collaborators to the multicultural core of Glen Johnson, Miguel Marin, Alasdair Steer and Jerome Tcherneyan, including former Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde and members of the Czars, Tarwater, Life Without Buildings and Tram.

It's a departure of sorts from the tone-poems and instrumentals of Son De Mar, not least in featuring vocals throughout. Not that you'd call these pieces "songs" – in most cases, they're simply texts recited over settings which aim to crystallise the moods of their poetic observations and dreamlike tableaux. "Postal" is typically quirky, with tinkling gamelan shading Suzy Mangion's fragile plaint, "I was a postal worker from May to July/I left because of allergies – the letters made me cry"; "Certainty", likewise, features gentle harp arpeggios behind musings on mortality. Elsewhere, tracks such as "Silence" and "The Season Is Long" seek to impose more pronounced rhythmic structures, the latter's slow, sluggish progress sounding like trip-hop minus the hop, its theme of longing picked out on vibes and that most melancholic of the string family, the viola. Found sounds – rain, bells, a thunderclap – are used to fashion subtle musique concrète textures in places, but they're always carefully employed to further a track's atmosphere and temperament, rising out of the backing like ghosts, or lingering like mist. Exquisite, if a touch too diffident at times.