Habitual quiet men Nils Frahm and Frank Schultge Blumm team up for an album of ambient folk and spectral, post-everything chamber-jazz, recorded with bags of reverb and with the investigative but plainspeaking, inviting air of an early 80s ECM side, or even of Jim O’Rourke’s recent The Visitor. What starts as a very mellow, meditative set gradually becomes more eventful and complex, climaxing for us with the majestic ‘Movements & Meetings’, which combines a bluesy lyricism with pontillistic rhythm and mischievous stereo-splitting. Beyond the individual technical skill of the two principals, it’s in the effortlessness of their interplay that the magic really lies; this duo, unlike so many collaborations, is more than the sum of its parts. The Germans’ natural empathy also means the music avoids sounding either cloyingly folksy or jarringly abstract; it’s neither sentimental (a common weakness in so much “contemporary classical” recording) nor mathematical. In this sense, it really is something that floats free, “music versus gravity” if you like – and at its best, it wins that battle hands-down.