oy Shapes, pregnant with an intense stasis and nocturnal elegance, is Charalambides’ most intimate offering yet. Five songs hedge a path, which shall take seventy-five minutes to pass through, yet demand frequent visits before unveiling all of its many secrets.

Surrounded by Joy Shapes undulating fields, the sight which most arrests are the dynamic and harmonic ranges being battered by Christina Carter’s jarring alto—her elliptical lyrics and insatiable cries being recorded in what Tom Carter could only describe as a “lost evening”. On “Here Not Here”, wordless vocal tone clusters seep out through skeletal arrangements of lap steel, bells, and wood wand, whilst moaning chimes teeter awkwardly, barely keeping balance, their staggering shifts staining the air with uneasiness. Though still rather timid, “Joy Shapes” is the most approachable progeny Charalambides have spawned in some time. Carter exhales a melancholy lullaby with guitar textures slumbering in a soft bed of resonant drones. As the piece sallies on, Tom Carter’s guitar grapples with Murray’s psaltery like a river rolls pebbles. “Natural Night”, meanwhile, adds new colour with brittle chimes crackling like crushed glass, gradually bleeding into dissonance. Carter’s voice looms in the shadows here, adding dimension and tonal possibility. After thirteen minutes of harsh chimes and sharp tones running the length of each other like knives being sharpened, a meek coda of whistling bells feels like crawling into a melodic duvet.

Each of these long, winding musical passages marry disciplined understatement to the sense of a disturbingly naked reality, indeed, they float about their guests like the ghost of Hamlet’s father: a gloomy phantom that communicates without speaking. “Voice For You”, is a reedy lap steel wandering through a labyrinth of long squealing tones, with gritty electric guitar reverberating overhead like a rock waiting to fall. Amid Carter’s a cappella, which shifts into a poignant banshee wail, lovely chance occurrences of displacement and empty space are stumbled upon and lend the proceedings an air of spontaneity.

Carter’s voice, which sounds like an instrument being tortured, is slowly treated so that it washes into the whirling tones and cacophonic scrapes which carry the album to its end.

If there is something alien about Joy Shapes it is not in the face of the otherworldly, but directly in the face of this world—the mood similar to the existentialism of Sartre or Camus, as they stumble before the alien image of what they are. A milestone in the quest for insightful rapprochement between composition and improvisation, Joy Shapes is an incredibly opulent and worryingly irresistible album indeed.