For his first stand-alone release, Julian Brink has repurposed and reorchestrated an incomplete score for an unfinished film. Utility Music was largely improvised by Brink and 11 experimental instrumentalists ‘in bedrooms’ in Los Angeles, New York, London, Frankfurt and Hamburg. From his West Hollywood bedroom Brink could record only in ‘the few quiet hours after the dying down of street noise in the evening’. Mix engineer Brian Losch made it sound as if the musicians on their real and toy instruments and on non-instruments alike were performing together in a single space. The 11 short, delectable tracks ‘toss boundaries’, as the trombonist provocateur Juliane Gralle observes. Taken together, it feels like there might still be a movie in there, somewhere.

‘Miniatures’ has the feel of a haunted, southern Viennese waltz surrounded in fog, its central beauty emerging serenely through the mist accompanied by drops of ringing pizzicatos. ‘At Night’ features cellist Joe Zeitlin creating other-worldly shadings of tone and colour then lifting them gently from the musical score. The two ‘Simple Trio’ tracks, which offer a vade mecum of ‘uncomplicated transitions between notes to make the samples sound more realistic’, feature the trio of Zeitlin, violinist Dan-Iulian Druţac and viola player Nick Revel of PUBLIQuartet, which Brink describes as ‘the heart of the album. I try to forget that they haven’t all met each other and aren’t playing together in the same room.’

‘Albatross’ channels John Cage and Morton Feldman with mesmerisingly deceptive, irregular beats, wonderfully quiet. The last track, ‘Pattern Shells’, influenced by Villa-Lobos, is a spontaneous splurge of brass and tropical birds.