Portico Quartet

★★★★ Terrain GONDWANA. CD/DL/LP

Londoners’ re-route, drawing on ambience and minimalism.

An act continuously refining their craft, the three slowly unfolding pieces of Portico Quartet’s sixth album find them conspicuously shifting away from their jazz roots into a more abstract conversational zone. Each movement pivoted around a short, repeated motif, that vanishes and reappears. I takes Duncan Bellamy’s hang-drum pattern and bathes it in waves of warm, shimmering synthetics as Jack Wyllie’s treated, sometimes bird-like sax circles mellifluously above. Piano is at the heart of the niftier, au naturel II, low cello drones underlying Wyllie’s inquisitive impressionistic figures, returning later thicker and heavier, before hope springs eternal as he arcs and dives over III’s rich percussive tapestry. Retaining the spooky cinematics that are Portico’s stock-in-trade, Terrain’s meld of Midori Takada and Sun Ra teases and tricks its way to mantric embrace.