The perfume analogy seems to extend across the whole disk whose title, the sleeve romantically informs, is an Asian flowering tree whose scent “embodies elements of shadow and light, eros and gnosis, earth and sky”. The track titles extend the whiffy metaphor, starting with ‘Ambergris’, a substance spat out by sperm whales that was used as a fixative for perfume, and then ‘Attar’, Persian for ‘aroma maker’, and going on to take in flowering plants (‘Verbena’), fragrant grass (‘Vetiver’), and a coniferous tree (‘Tamarack’). The image of a bird’s nest on the cover further suggests that the album is intended as a blend of natural offerings.

And yet, although expertly engineered with the crispiest of percussion and richest of sonorities, the individual scents are not transcribed into sound. Each track is so similar, drawing on the same instrumentation whose layers are gradually revealed across the same temporal grid, that the aroma produced is consistent  throughout.

And it’s a recognisable smell, neither unpleasant nor natural. A mellifluous gracefulness is guaranteed on any of Ylang’s nine tracks with their calmly shuffling drums politely complemented by an acoustic bass and dinner jazz piano. This provides an orderly backdrop to a lead guitar or flute – the guitar solos often remind of the anaemic noodling of latter day Pink Floyd but are preferable to the flute’s presence, which is always piled on thickly as it meanders around airily, forgetting to provide respite from its stereotypical mystical movements. You will have heard this type of music before either as a soundtrack to computer games or TV documentaries attempting to evoke an ancient civilisation or in those quaint shops that sell dream catchers and healing crystals.

‘First rain’, the final track, deviates slightly by bringing a cello and violin into the frame, adding a darker hue to an otherwise beige blandness. It is perhaps named after the ritual found closer to Rich’s home where students of the University of California run naked through the campus during the first rainfall of the school year – the sort of abandonment that is lacking from Ylang’s measured but vapid fusion.