For those wondering where reductionism could go after the extreme near-nothingness of three or four years back, here's one possible direction – soft noise. As if the tiny sounds made by musicians in between those all-too-rare notes were all that remained, a strange assemblage of mildly disturbing rustles and crackles, as the focus shifts from the musicians themselves to the world around them, with an increased use of field recordings. There are some dogs woofing and sniffing somewhere in the background at the beginning of the first of these two tracks (total duration just over 34 minutes), but the accompanying photography is ugly urban high rise – let's hope this wasn't where the music was recorded – and if you can imagine what it might sound like to contact mic a rat and record it scurrying around inside a metal dustbin full of sweet wrappers, paperclips and those polystyrene worm things they use to protect electrical appliances in transit, you'll have an idea of the music. The performers are Claudio Rochetti (turntable, small percussion, radio), Luca Sigurtà (cymbals, objects and toys) and Fhievel (electronics and field recordings), and the name they've chosen for the album is quite a good one, at least the "pocket" bit of it, since most of the music on offer here sounds as if it was recorded by tiny microphones hidden inside a plastic anorak. Whether or not "progressive" is an appropriate epithet is open to question – tiny sounds have, after all, been around for some time already (Morphogenesis, anyone?) – but the other possible way out of reductionism, the one favoured by Messrs Malfatti and Sugimoto, leads even further into silence, and if there's one thing Pocket Progressive isn't, it's silent.