The idea that rock music ever pretended to promise ‘transcendence’ is ridiculous, or at least it seems so under present conditions. Leaving aside the obvious question even (‘transcendence’ of what?), the idea seems archaic, optimistic in a way that’s hard to access in the Trump/Brexit era. Chris Forsyth’s music is too kinetically aware, too intelligent and frankly too goddamn punk to make any such outsized promises but also nearly impossible to hear without considering the idea. Because as sure as ‘Dreaming In The Non-Dream’ is subject to all the dread pressures that have contorted us all of late – it would be a drab mistake to call this a ‘political record’ but also straight-up lazy to miss its subtle cues. It’s a record that conveys ecstasy as surely as Pharoah Sanders does, or the Velvet Underground did.

In this respect, it’s hard to imagine who Forsyth’s contemporaries might be. It’s always been this way: the greats tend to feel a little out-of-plumb with their moment (only hindsight lets us see it otherwise) and Forsyth’s music has been sparring with some large forces from the beginning. He’s always united the homely with the astral, the abstract with the visceral in his ‘Solar Motels’ and ‘Intensity Ghosts’. There’s something different about ‘Dreaming In The Non-Dream’, though. There’s a fresh economy involved here, a sense of not a note wasted.

Despite psychedelic leanings, Forsyth’s records have always trained toward concision – plenty of space, yet never slack – but these tunes erupt with startling swiftness, then spend the rest of their quick-burning lives teasing multiple moods and patterns out of relatively simple materials.

‘History & Science Fiction’ pads in on the back of a slinky, almost shy, bassline, then – after a little blast of glassy percussion – hurls us about a mile into the air before arriving, startlingly, at a saxophone arrangement that evokes early Roxy Music.

The title track seems to gene-splice two of the great minimalist themes, Pere Ubu’s ‘Heart Of Darkness’ and Neu’s ‘Hallogallo’, into one surging, winding, pulsing ride.

Even the pensive, aqueous ‘Two Minutes Love’, which sounds a bit like something Ry Cooder could’ve written for the ‘Paris, Texas’ soundtrack troubled by ghosts both placid and deranged, does a lot with barely more than a whisper.

‘Two Minutes Love’ inverts Orwell’s ‘Two Minutes Hate’ from ‘1984’.

It’s ‘Have We Mistaken The Bottle For The Whiskey Inside?’ that’s most explicit. Over a prowling, stabbing, Stones-ish backdrop – one that, naturally, will accelerate itself into something different – Forsyth sings about transcendence: about “los(ing) my senses” and the suspension of self-judgment, about the gaps between ideation and execution and, of course, between container and content.