Pink Saliva won’t ever ask for your ears — they’ll simply begin and demand your full attention, all other matters be damned. Found on upstart Montréal label &records, this Montréal-based trio’s self-titled debut is a series of short and incredibly focused improvisations that calls for repeated listening. Indeed, throughout this — their fourth release — Ellwood Epps (trumpet), Michel F Côté (drums, microphones, lapsteel) and Alexandre St-Onge (electric bass, laptop) thoroughly reward the attentive listener with the latest findings from an ongoing exploration of this group’s seemingly limitless sonic potential.

It is a record consisting largely of improvisations full of ambient drones and feedback from St-Onge’s laptop and Côté’s ingenious use of Pignose-amplified-contact-microphones-turned-drumsticks, which serve as a leaping-off point for Epps’ meditative trumpet playing (Really Deadly Romantic). However in other places, there are improvisations such as Yes, As A Look Springs To Its Face, which, at times, sounds thoughtful to a point where one starts to wonder whether the record contains through-composed works (note: it does not). It is, in a phrase, captivatingly dark and profoundly serious.

However for the dark and serious mood established and maintained by these fine musicians, there is an unmistakable joie de vivre that also permeates the record’s forty-one minutes; one would be hard-pressed to find a statement without intention anywhere on this record — and you know Pink Saliva knows it — which makes for a palpable sense of excitement and confidence. I would like to name a standout track, but that almost seems to miss the record’s point. This is very much an album in the truest sense of the word — with each piece developing, exploring, trashing, and rebuilding ideas that come before and after — simultaneously showing the way forward and destroying the path behind — inviting listeners to make their own way through an exquisite sonic environment.