So it is with some relish that we find Cyclobe’s fourth album, ‘Wounded Galaxies Tap at the Window’, to be an even more refined and dramatic excursion than before. In part, this is due to the choice of crew as much as the captains – Michael J York and Cliff Stapleton play the Duduk and the Hurdy-Gurdy respectively throughout the album, donating organic material for morphological experimentation, while Thighpaulsandra’s tender piano is central to ‘Sleeper’, one of two extended pieces on the album, the other of which (‘The Woods Are Alive With The Smell Of His Coming’) features John Contreras’ increasingly intoxicated cello. But the album’s charm is also greatly strengthened through a deft balance that has matured in captains Stephen Thrower and Ossian Brown’s navigational skills: compared to ‘Wounded Galaxies…’, Cyclobe’s previous releases can seem hard going with their excessively abstracted and layered topographies rewarding only the most intrepid, but here the duo seem to have managed to contrast their more wayward inclinations with an stateliness that only serves to strengthen their spell.

Perhaps the strongest case in point here is the longest piece, ‘The Woods Are Alive…’, that was apparently built in real time. It opens with a solo woodwind fanfare, like a satyr leading the listener into a forest, where a mantric marimba defines a clearing that slowly becomes populated by alien presences invoked through increasingly treated folk instrumentation - reeds, hurdy-gurdy and cello. Like many Cyclobe tracks, the piece breathes with an organic quality far removed from the tyrannical grid of a sequencer, but unlike previous work it is less dense as a whole and allows greater room for the listener to explore the layers as they unfurl – conjuring a ceremonial dance that gradually gets heavier and heavier, but never completely drowns the propulsive ritualistic rhythm at its heart. Appropriately enough, the piece made its debut last year at the Tate St Ives gallery in south-west England where it provided a soundtrack for an exhibition exploring modernism and the occult. One can imagine the soiling effect its crescendo had, briefly but indelibly marked by a surprise sequence reminiscent of harsh rave stabs, on patrons of the gallery.

Unsurprisingly, in view of Ossian Brown’s obsession with early American Hallowe'en photos and the art of Austin Osman Spare, and Stephen Thrower being a world authority on outsider cinema, Cyclobe can be relied upon for making the most genuinely scary of compositions. Indeed, the scent of horror film soundtracks permeates the Cyclobe sound and occasionally hints at Morricone’s more abstract scores for the so-called giallo films of the late sixties and early seventies that took in influences from modern classical composition of the time. ‘Sleeper’ with its four subtitles (‘The Blue Towers’, ‘The Copper Bells’, ‘Ghost Ribbon’ and ‘The Unknowable Index’) and central, recurring piano theme, suggests such a creepy cinematic narrative that goes from slow, bludgeoning deep notes and a daunting clatter of metal, through mysterious pastoral passages complete with crows cawing along to Thighpaulsandra’s silken notes, to end up drenched in scribbles of fizzing digitalia, wailing horns and obscured vocal incantations.

As with previous Cyclobe releases, listening to ‘Wounded Galaxies…’ reveals a range of dualities whose resolution (or lack of one) could be their defining characteristic – a cyclobic quality. Purely synthesized tones spiral around acoustic ones, organic sounds unravel into digital trills, improvised skronk evolves into edited strata, all combining to produce an effect that resonates with a sense of both inner and outer space. It is tempting to attribute these diametrical paradigms to the two Cyclobe members with Stephen Thrower as the Dionysian improvising reveller and Ossian Brown the Apollonian dreamer and editor in a Nietzschean fusion that gives a sense of the “primordial unity” that he observed in ancient Greek tragedies (from which Cyclobe’s name is perhaps derived?). Of course, the truth will be more complex with each having characteristics in both camps, but there does seem to be a healthy dovetailing at stake, producing a unique range of wild elegance and polished chaos that ‘Wounded Galaxies…’ has in abundance, and is essential to experience.