Australian percussionist, composer and producer Laurence Pike with new Soloalbum. Improvisation has always played a role throughout Laurence Pike's long and diverse career in music. Whether as part of PVT, Triosk or Szun Waves, or collaborating with Liars, legendary jazz pianist Mike Nock, DD Dumbo or the mighty Bill Callahan, he has long been a responsive musician for whom sensitive listening leads to spontaneous invention. Every motion, from the most minuscule flicker to a primal groove, is an expression of what's happening around him. Which is precisely how he, and the ensembles he's been part of, have been able to navigate so deftly between the poles of the familiar. Pike's work has always skirted around electronica, spiritual jazz, post-rock and many other recognisable sounds, without ever converging on one single style or resorting to obvious fusions. Now, he is formalising his approach in new ways, making this continual act of creation in the moment as unconscious as possible. "The aim for my solo work," he says, "has been to use technology to expand the sonic potential of the drum kit, without ever limiting the capacity for human expression." This was crystallised on Distant Early Warning, his 2018 solo album, for which tracks were recorded entirely live, with Pike playing both drums and sampler. This time around, confident in the success of what he calls a "conceptual experiment," he's concentrated that process further, developing and assembling samples ("pieces of a puzzle," as he puts it) in a single month and recording Holy Spring live in one day. Thematically inspired by the pagan fertility myths of Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring, Pike has established a rigorous compositional method that lays the groundwork for spontaneity: he arranges his puzzle pieces carefully, knowing that the music he wanted to hear would emerge, regardless of how they assembled themselves in the moment.