Andrew Wasylyk, CCA, Glasgow ****

From Boards of Canada to Mogwai, Bill Wells and Erland Cooper, Scotland has long specialised in a fine strain of heartfelt and inventive instrumental music, no review of which would be complete without the word “cinematic”. But never before has it produced anything quite like the lush, jazz-inflected ambient sonic vistas of Andrew Wasylyk.

Long on the scene as the frontman of Tayside indie-pop quartet The Hazey Janes and bassist with alt-rock veterans Idlewild, Wasylyk (real name Andrew Mitchell) has been mining a rich seam in his solo guise at the prolific rate of an album a year since 2019. His latest work Hearing the Water Before Seeing the Falls (because instrumental music wouldn’t be itself without wordy titles) was inspired by US landscape photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper, whose exhibition The World’s Edge at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh Wasylyk was commissioned to respond to. Richly brought to life on stage by a seven-piece band variously on bass and drums, cello, viola, flute, trumpet, guitar and more, led by Wasylyk on keys and accompanied with trippy-bucolic visual projections by Tommy Perman, it made for an immersive and transporting live experience.

Off-kilter groovy with a fluttering string arrangement, The Confluence felt like the title theme from some sort of 1970s New York City cop drama about a down-at-heel detective with a good heart and a bad reputation. Sun Caught Cloud Like The Belly Of A Cat conjured meditative lockdown walks in Wasylyk’s Balgay neighbourhood of Dundee. The Life of Time saw photographer Cooper make a cameo of sorts, in the form of a wistful spoken word recording laid over entrancing piano arpeggios. Jazzy smooth in a queasy, slightly uneasy kind of way,Last Sunbeams of Childhood struck a delicately nuanced note of disquieting contemplation.

Music review: Andrew Wasylyk, CCA, Glasgow