Levitation Orchestra are a London jazz collective, 14 strong here, whose second album was composed by discussing ideas about childhood, astrophysics and the brain’s byways, writing in splinter-cells, then recombining for band development. Exploring underlying philosophies as well as music, they sound like a monastic or revolutionary cell, Sun Ra’s Arkestra surely a more than musical influence.

Illusions & Realities’ loosely conceptual suite also recalls Cassie Kinoshi’s SEED Ensemble in its vocal wrestling with iniquity, here based on gender or neurological difference. ‘Delusion’, with saxes talking and violins and harp in a gypsy swirl, considers brain lesions and “inter-subjective fictions”, socially useful constructs here leaving some in paranoid pain, and others convinced that “playing the saxophone actually makes sense”. Taking a more playful approach to disturbance, ‘Spiral (Die, Die, Die!)’ is as Hitchcockian as its title and stabbing, Psycho strings.

Alice Coltrane is an acknowledged influence, and Maria Osuchowska’s harp is a versatile lead instrument, offering limpid, Eastern bookends to ‘Life Is Suffering – Send And Receive Only’, trancey on ‘Child Part III’, and a buzzing irritant then diaphanous veil cast over ‘Child Part IV’. ‘Between Shadows’ is swoony and ominous, as the strings make their slinky, serpentine crawl. The concluding ‘Many In Body, One In Mind’ then begins with the sort of pharaonic brass grandeur beloved of Kamasi Washington and Miles Mosley. “I put my truth in my box and I burnt it,” a rapper exults, before the track explodes towards its communal climax.

Trumpeter Axel Kaner-Lindstrom is a modest musical director, rarely taking centre-stage. Illusions & Realities’ sometimes baggy, discursive yet genuinely orchestral compositions bulge with players and ideas but, like the band itself, hang together in effective unity.