The Leaf Lab

Nancy Elizabeth's third album, Dancing, emerged incrementally. Seeking to repair and retreat after an intense period of travel and personal flux, Nancy created a bower in her tiny Manchester flat, with a piano at the centre, guitars hung on the wall, and her unique palette of instruments within easy reach. Flat broke and stuck at home, and using a computer to help her make music for the first time, she began to develop a new sound in her isolation. Slowly, surely, she nurtured these twelve handsome songs, playing and recording almost everything herself. Remarkably, the resulting album is her most cohesive and most uplifting yet.

Craven Faults: Sidings [CD]

Holy Spring is the second solo album by Australian percussionist, drummer and composer Laurence Pike - an article of faith, expressing the sense that the ritual of performance can transcend the confines of style, structure and concept to connect with something universal. The name of the album is beautifully ambiguous, evoking a wellspring, but also rebirth, and more besides. It sounds constantly, effervescently fresh, just as it should when its creation was a series of surprises to its own creator. The listener, just like the musician, are privy to what Pike describes as the music simply playing itself.Improvisation has played a role throughout Pikes long and diverse career in music. Whether as part ofPVT, Triosk or Szun Waves, or collaborating with Liars, legendary jazz pianist Mike Nock, DD Dumbo orthe mighty Bill Callahan, he has long been a responsive musician for whom sensitive listening leads tospontaneous invention.

Warmduscher: Tainted Lunch [CD]

Snapped Ankles: Hard Times Furious Dancing [CD]

Temporal is the elegantly restrained new album by Canadian cellist/composer Julia Kent. Following the dissonance and tension of her previous album for Leaf, 2015's Asperities, Temporal is a meditation on the transitory and fragile nature of existence.

Canadian-born, New York City-based cellist Julia Kent's third solo album. Recorded alone in her home studio, Character develops the layering techniques Kent brought to the fore on her previous solo material, the flow of intertwining cello motifs working as an external representation of competing internal meditations. "I ended up thinking about the process of life," explains Kent. "How sometimes a narrative in fiction is meant to mirror the chronology of human life, and how our lives, in a way, can resemble works of fiction, but without the possibility of controlling the outcome the way an author can." Thus, she called the album Character, a reference to the notion of humans being characters in their own narrative.