Pooling performers from art music, folk, jazz and punk backgrounds, the new album ‘E V ER Y RU N G O N TH I S L AD D E R TO G OD’ shows their shared capacity for eclectic experimentation.

n.o. Art Ensemble are a loosely bound collective of musicians centred around its driving forces Leo Fincham and Kit Mosely, but saying that captures only a fraction of the picture. Releasing via Slow Dance imprint MOTR Records and featuring a rotating cast of performers linked to many of Britain’s most exciting musical projects of the past few years, the collective speak of the art music underbelly that has shaped the relatively more conventional releases of its contributors.

Their new album, ‘E V ER Y RU N G O N TH I S L AD D E R TO G OD,’ feels like something of a missing link between the worlds of art music and alternative popular music. Indeed, though its labelling defines this as art music, as did the abrasive pre-album single ‘Kolosseum / War, N.d,’ the album is not entirely bound by these parameters, at points far more conventional in its arrangements.

At the group’s core, co-producer Kit Mosely occupies as much of his time playing with Martha Skye Murphy. Adding Trombone is Tom Hardwick-Allan of Shovel Dance Collective, whose releases blur folk tradition with modern experimentation, and Gentle Stranger, the riotous ‘post-clown’ trio who can seemingly turn any genre they approach inside out. Alex McKenzie, also part of Shovel Dance and Gentle Stranger as well as caroline, plays flute, while drummer Pike was once at the core of experimental post-punk group In Tongues and is now the regular drummer for heka. The applicability of these musicians’ instincts to an ‘art music’ release is a telling spotlighting of the approaches that enliven their relatively other musical endeavours.

Going the other way, this collection gains deeper art music legitimacy with an exciting feature from Charlemagne Palestine, who connects this project to its heritage, having himself collaborated with Tony Conrad, Terry Riley and La Monte Young.

‘E V ER Y RU N G…’ is forthrightly eclectic, an overused term that is truly applicable here. ‘…Ascension’ is built around a building collective improvisation that captures the potential scale of the collective’s sound and anchors the themes suggested by the title. This gives way to the beautifully gentle ‘For breaking an opening in the sky,’ in which the use of harmonies, melodies and string swells creates the atmosphere of a haunted folk music. Similarly straightforward (relative to other moments on the album) is ‘MOUNTAINSONG,’ built around a folk lyric and a simple piano loop, a track would not be out of place on Sufjan Stevens’ ‘Seven Swans.’

On this album, the disjunctive placement of ‘MOUNTAIN SONG’ keeps it true to the project. The track is followed by ‘Kolosseum,’ the collaboration with Charlemagne Palestine, which opens with an imposing, chainsaw like stack of drones. Indeed, the achievement of this record is its creators’ ability to find comparable beauty between such moments. Giving oneself to the opening of ‘Kolosseum,’ its hum does take on a meditatively apian quality, before the piece relaxes into a section lead by a beautifully operatic vocal that sharpens the focus as the piece goes on.

The group’s exercise in experimentalism and sensitivity for sparsity and maximalism spotlights details that have enlivened works by its associated artists. Performed by a mixture of dedicated art music practitioners and a patchwork of musicans from across alt, jazz and folk backgrounds, ‘E V ER Y RU N G…’ is a unique and rich collection showing the value of the interaction between these related spheres.