Maybe due to the fact that I spent my childhood living by the sea, when I travel to a landlocked country I become acutely aware of its inaccessibility. Even here in London town it doesn’t feel so bad; it wouldn’t take all that long to get to the Kent or Sussex coast, assuming the ex-Connex train lines weren’t having one of their periodic spazz-outs (note: never suggest to me that Southend-on-Sea is on the sea. It is not. That there water is the filthy great Thames estuary, and no number of piers and grotty arcades will convince me otherwise). That absence was felt on my recent trip to the Czech republic, particularly when trapped on one of their worse-than-Connex train services - the rail replacement bus between Stribro and Kozolupy which caused me no little consternation is likely to remain in place for at least a couple of years, so the weary locals told me. Still, at least I had the new ocean-themed album by Chris Abrahams and Mike Cooper to assuage my various complaints.

You may well know Abrahams from his work in mapsadaisical favourites The Necks, where his thoughtful piano motifs were absorbed into their slow-shifiting improvisational continuums. Cooper’s name was less familiar to me, much to my shame when I scanned his biography: a British guitarist who has played blues with Howlin’ Wolf, jazz with Louis Moholo, improv with Eddie Prevost et al, and who has written the Hawaiian chapter in the Rough Guide to World Music. Blimey. On Oceanic Feeling - Like, the pair drift off on the sea, setting sail on “Oceanic Feeling-Like Part One” and heading out of port on “Memory Of Water”, Cooper’s rusty boat rock doused in Abrahams’ shimmering surfaces. At the end of this second piece, a deep sub-aqua rumble rises to hint at he power of the ocean below, after which the improvised interlude “Hechizo” feels very much like a becalming. Not that that need be a bad thing, as the idyllic bob in the sunshine “Surfside Number Two” shows - time spent doing little can be time spent very well indeed (I needed reminding of that fact when I was stuck on a train trying to decipher extraordinarily convoluted announcements on Czech). The two split ship chores satisfyingly on “Board Wax” and “Waiting for Otis”, the former with some scrabbly Bailey-esque guitar work from Cooper, the latter with Abrahams’s piano lines becoming increasingly tangled in electronic wash.

The good ship Oceanic Feeling - Like sets sail from Room 40 about now. Get yourself a good cabin with a window view, and be comforted in the knowledge that no broken rail is going to interrupt this trip.