There’s atmospheric and there’s atmospheric and then there’s Set Fire To Flames. The 13-piece improv crew from Montreal has been called an offshoot of Godspeed You! Black Emperor — but given the sprawling, anti-hierarchical nature of the milieu they operate in, it’s maybe fairer to say they coexist and overlap. In fact the hour and a quarter of sound on SFTF’s debut feels more like a natural process than the result of any human endeavour. Not to say that it’s unmusical — there are at various points dubwise trip hop loops, sections of fragile guitar and drum improv, shimmering violin harmonics, hovering synth chords, even a full-on GY!BE ecstatic post-rock crescendo in “Shit-Heap-Gloria of the New Town Planning.” But these elements arise out of silence or found sound and die away again in ways that it’s hard to discern intention in. Tracks last a minute, or thirteen minutes, things seem overheard rather than broadcast at you, time dissolves as you’re listening. It feels often like you’ve stepped into a dream city that has its own laws of physics and causality and these are natural processes of this space. But that city — dark and forlorn and puzzling though it might be — is beautiful, a place you want to keep coming back to. As a pushing through and beyond the possibilities of post-rock, this album stands alone as a unique achievement — for its sound, and because it helped launch the then still fledgling UK label FatCat records’s 130701 imprint which would become a lynchpin for post-classical / non-classical music into the 2000s.

– Joe Muggs