Forgive the impressionistic descriptions here, but the title track from Margaret Kammerer’s Why Is The Sea So Blue (Mikroton) is a musical isolation tank. The record is a product of multiple collaborations over seven years: Kammerer set high and low verse, Christoph Kurzmann arranged the songs into jazzy kaleidoscopes, and Valerio Tricoli remixed the tracks into weightless orbs. One can sense the plural sources, of voices slowly colliding into and enveloping each other. The result elicits strange feelings of both dissociation and convergence, the kinetic stillness of open water.

A concise statement of the thematic head. Syncopated vocal lines are awash in the intertwining resonances of monolithic guitar arpeggios, ghostly harmonics, metallic refractions of lap steel, and sinusoidal string-like synth. Staggered delays and superimposed doublings displace pulse – a rotation around oscillating chords instead of a temporal progression.

Morphing the head with improvised elaboration. A lonesome, streetlight trumpet solo, lulling and lyric, bruised and beatnik, with occasional compound interval leaps that flash like bioluminescence. The wisp of wordless voice rejoins. The vibraphone shimmers. The trumpet and its double explore the polar ends of its range, blooming timbre from pure mutes through rough Alveolar trills.

A suspended calm in sinking descent before drowning.