The double bass has always been close to Gavin Bryars’ heart. His own instrument, it has also featured strongly in his music for other players – as in The Church Closest to the Sea, written for Mr McFall’s Chamber and their bassist Rick Standley.

Voices, meanwhile, are a more recent concern, displayed here in typically understated settings of Petrarch translations by the Irish playwright J.M. Synge. Bryars’ music straddles worlds: classical and jazz, composition and improvisation, the works on this disc moving between the lushly sensuous and the coolly laid-back as they meditate on geographical and emotional borderlands.