Colourform, Visions of Surya (Virtual World Records)

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Between 1999 and 2001, Matt Hillier (aka Ishq) worked on an album as pretty and singular as the species of flower for which it is named. "Orchid" was originally released as a single (though lengthy) CD on Interchill in 2002 and shortly thereafter with an accompanying disc of some forty additional minutes on Dakini.

The album is a nearly flawless gem of limb-stretching "relax and don´t think" music, including possibly the best use of a throaty, acoustic bass bottom (especially on the penulitmate track "Bakhti") on any ambient release. Happily, this CD is still available through Virutal World mail order.

Around the same time the record was released, he started making music with Jake Stephenson, who sadly passed away just recently. To mark that event, Hillier, dubbing their duo Colourform, has issued a compendium of their work from 2002 to 2007 under the title Visions of Surya on his two-year-old ambient label.

These visions are vaguely oriental, but of an imaginary Orient, or born of a lost sense of wonder in our own world, like Marco Polo telling the Kublai Khan tall tales of invisible cities in Italo Calvino´s short novel. It shimmers and glitters, but sometimes reveals that just beneath the surface lies a gritty, dank and dusty reality.

The fourth track, "Monkey Puzzle", serves to plainly illustrate the kind of "urban bucolic" atmosphere Colourform are trying to create - as it comes to an end, we hear the unmistakeable sounds of a traffic jam - of bicycles and rickshaws - here comes the real Third World.

The album is sublime when it allows female vocals to soar like Indian swallows, and ridiculous when shortly thereafter another - or the same? - voice is Stephen Hawkinged to spout incomprehensible robot-speak. But then again, the piece is named "Flying Carpet" and is a gem of cartoonish ambient orientalism.

A fine album with great ambitions, the foremost of which has been easily achieved - hailing a fallen comrade.