Pseudonyms are the last hiding place of the devil, or Derren Brown as he likes to call himself these days. That is, of course, after he has exhausted his usual well-established list of hiding places - the blue dress, the jar of spicy pasta sauce, Mysterious Ways plc, and so on. Behind the name Isambard Khroustaliov lurks Sam Britton, one half of the inveterate sound-fiddlers Icarus, and on Nowhere he indulges in some devilishly good dialogue with bass clarinetist Lothar Ohlmeier.

There are ample precedents for this sort of thing, but the most apposite would be Spring Heel Jack’s immersion in the world of free improv. Britton takes on the Ashley Wales role here, processing and layering, adding background textures, all the while displaying the same fascination with the minutiae of sounds as you would expect from his previous work. On “Haze” he splinters, granulates and swirls some breathy clarinet, “After Sunrise” and “Dusk” both feature him weaving snatches of (barely recognisable) pre-recorded piano amongst Ohlmeier’s doleful phrases. while on “Monkey Puzzle” it is the incessant tapping of the instrument’s keys which provides Britton with a lattice on which to hang his intricate montage. For me, the centrepiece “The Vague Terrain” is the highlight, with the woodwind squeaking in distress, hounded by tape distortion and harrassed by abrasive static, all buzzing round it like a swarm of angry bees.

Any notion of this as an intellectual exercise is offset by the same impish playfulness which characterises Britton’s releases with Icarus. In Ohlmeier he has found another sympathetic foil, and between them they have clearly reached the correct conclusion as to the devil’s true whereabouts: he was in the detail, all along.

Nowhere is available now from Post Everything.