Keane, Mel: Airs LP

Like its predecessor, 'Airs' is a demonstration of Dublin-based Keane's virtuosic sound design skills, but it's not showy. While 'Frog Of Earth' attempted to unravel the outside world from the perspective of an amphibian, 'Airs' imagines an open, untouched landscape devoid of sound - the perfect place for Keane to deploy his granulized, pliable sonic treatments. He builds, or grows, his soundscapes from tiny, indistinct microsamples, stuttering choral voices and celestial plucks on 'Psygod' and opting to focus on harmony, rather than density. Keane lets his granules undulate, keeping the tempo relatively stable with the strings, and then fluxing the timeline with stuttering syllables and sibilances that concertina from that central point.

'Zither FC' takes a similar approach with lopsided zither strums (provided by Filipa Cordeiro), while 'Goldcrest Solo' makes the titular tiny bird's dawn chorus unrecognizable, turning the high pitched chirps into comb-filtered, Autotuned yodels. Keane's clean slated world is our own warped by a burnished mirror: on 'Res Glyph', there's a rare patter of percussive snaps that the producer intersperses with snatches of hi-sheen, glassy synth, off-world whistles and Tortoise-like strums. Unrecognizable, robotic vocals bend as if they're being blown off course by solar winds - it's confidently digital music, but packed with earthly lifelines that help cushion the experience.

Even on 'Book Nano', a deconstructed hymnal that Keane produced with help from his wherethetimegoes cohort Finn Carraher McDonald (aka Nashpaints), the android plainsong is disrupted by phantasmagoric harps and oozing processed effervescence. Look a little closer, and there's the silhouette of pop behind 'Palms' with its refried ad-libs and baroque convolutions, and on 'Finn's Hymn' we're escorted to the departure lounge by a re-synthesized voice that's tenderized until it's as ductile as the goldcrest's call.