ARBORE is the collaborative project of French-born, Berlin-based artists Diane Barbé and Laure Boer, navigating the wide spectrum of electroacoustics, instrument building and radical improvisation. Cavernous and kaleidoscopic, their debut album ‘Aboyer au mauvais arbre’ is a psychedelic ritual that transports us beyond the corporeal realm

On the first side’s long centrepiece ‘Chemin de montagne’, feral homemade flutes call out over collapsing percussive wrinkles and cryptic chimes. Scraped string improvisations shepherd us in the direction of trad folk, but then a fudgy, sub-heavy kick takes us into a half-speed dub. Boer’s Vietnamese zither is the star of the show, with Barbé’s xenharmonic whistles floating like bird calls over the top. When Aldous Huxley’s voice flutters and saturates over rickety drums and horn blasts on the ritualistic life march ‘Pas une trompette’, their psychedelic intentions are made clear.

On the flip, the duo warp a gentle French lullaby, singing to each other before the words stretch out into ‘Lost Highway’-level reality distortions. It sets the mood for the album’s eldritch second half which kicks into a different pace on the electro-plated ‘Petit crabe’, a drum machine & oscillator jam that gets snagged on its ruff edges. Then, on ‘La main sur la corde’, they gently pluck the zither, before the grand finale ‘Son Long’ stretches a vocal drone that pits Barbé and Boer’s voices against each other, picking out tonal variations and ferric ghost notes.