ssabae: le roi est l’oiseau LP

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Shadowy French ensemble ssabæ follow last year's exceptionally lysergic 'azurescens' with another surreal crackle from behind the pineal, dissolving folk, jazz, chanson, concrète and experimental electronics into an overpowering elixir. Essential listening if yr into Voice Actor, Third Eye Foundation, Luboš Fišer, Islaja or Oï les Ox.

If there's one thing that drew us to their last album 'azurescens' it was the album's effortless grasp of psychedelia - not a single particular aesthetic or another, but the feeling of wonder and radical openness you might feel after a dose of psylocybin. The mysterious collective retain the same sense of expansive and heady exploration on 'le roi est l'ouseau' (the king is the bird), providing few clues but allowing us to live in their fantasy world for a while longer.

A dimmed piano draws us into dusk on 'une goutte qui se forme' (a drop that forms), melting over cricket trills and distant sirens. Laura Lippie's sooty vocals go from a rasp to a stifled cry, smudged into dubby repetition, while Gwen Jamois' muted sax provides a lounging, jazz anchor. It's music for the golden hour, as traces of sunlight gradually get suffocated by darkness. On 'ornithoptère' they reference early synth experiments with glassy drones and illusory instruments that disperse into their trace elements, while '7arche' (septarch), is a collision of Reichian minimalism and medieval woodwind.

Each track is an opportunity for ssabæ to draw from another source of inspiration, using historical, cultural references to arrange their output like a prism, with folk refracting into subtle, chirruping oscillations and half-speed, café jazz evolving into a snoring, moonlit lullaby. On the title track, they expand their range, using a bedrock of organ drones and cautious woodwind around labyrinthine channels and birdsong. It's just one piece of a perplixing but enthralling puzzle.