The exotic-minded, noumenal loom of bluesman Mike Cooper and innovative multi-instrumentalist Pierre Bastien spins further, imaginative yarns of pseudo-ethnomusicology recorded on the Mid-Atlantic isle Tenerife.

‘Aquapelagos Vol.2 Indico’ reprises the series’ theme of music from and by cultures surrounded by water with master improvisors Cooper & Bastien unfurling impressionistic, improvised odes to islands of the Indian Ocean. They draw from a combined, deep wellspring of energies and ideas from concrète, psychedelia, outernational folk musicks, drone, and field recordings, combined with good ol’ fine-tuned intuition for a heady trip into sounds they imagine, or know, derive from equatorial waters. Under titles dedicated to various specks in the ocean, they conjure a ghostly rabble of jaw’s harp twang and chanting tape loops leading to dockside chorales and bobbing masts in ‘Return to Chagos’, beside the gutturally processed trumpet and theramin-like whine layered in eerie exotica on ‘Trincomalee’, before hacking into humid, overgrown jungles scenes teeming with wildlife sounds in ’Nicobar’ that smartly hail its untold mystery, while invoking ritualist atmospheres with something like panting and throat singing heard down a trumpet tube amid the cicadas and pensive synth drone of ’Tuangku’, dedicated to the tiny Indonesian island. “From Philip Hayward and Matt Hill’s liner notes: ‘’The album opens with Return To Chagos by emphasising human presence in the oceanic space, opening with gentle percussive taps and distant looped male vocalisation that gradually come into sharper focus, layered and thickened, accompanied by thicker percussion and mouth harp. The sense of departure is taken up in Trincomalee, which lifts over the oceanic textures, opening with slow, struck and scraped metallic sounds before thick low pitched wind instrument sounds enter, oscillating around shifting microtonal frequencies. The shore returns on Side 2, with the miniature epic of Nicobar elaborated over looped ‘atmos’ sounds of birds and insects over which tonal, slightly distorted electric guitar lines enter before looped high pitched feedback squeals join the texture. Summoning tropical storms and the disruption to the region caused by western intrusion, strong and startling brass accents appear, melding with the looping guitar feedback, creating eeriness and a sense of alarm. Tuangku is permeated by restrained dynamics and an expressive, breathy, low pitched, animalistic melodic voice that offers intermittent and ambiguous utterances, as if rendered in a language essential to and evocative of a place and time but impossible to precisely comprehend – coming from an ocean-aquapelagic beyond that can only be glimpsed and rendered by affect.’’