Alex Roth convened the MultiTraction Orchestra as an audacious Covid riposte, beating lockdown's loneliness by inviting 27 musicians from 15 countries to react to his suggestive guitar sketches, a potential Babel arduously arranged into 2020's ‘emerge entangled’ single.

It's the sort of long-range community and unconventional, sometimes inverted composition also attempted on Ant Law and Alex Hitchcock's recent Same Moon in the Same World, both finding benign opportunity at a frightening moment. Reactor One's title is rooted in particle physics, referring to energy produced through ‘experimentation and fusion under extreme conditions'. Begun as the Omicron wave began to recede, Roth is one of seven mostly UK-based musicians, some of whom heard more than guitar to play to, forestalling full, Illustrious Corpse chaos.

Arve Henriksen's limpid, lonely trumpet opens ‘Reactor One Part I’, every breath and key-press reverberant in solitary space, embodying the isolation the album wrestles with. Kate Ellis’ cello's darker gallop joins his Eastern tone, which ends in a muezzin wail, too plaintive to pierce the music's melancholy veil.

‘Part II’'s post-Velvet Underground guitar drones offer a contrasting psychedelic haze around James Allsopp's sinuous sax, painlessly colliding with Henriksen across parallel timestreams. New GoGo Penguin drummer Jon Scott's soft explosions and Ruth Goller's bass grind join a seething near-cacophony given more cosmic force on ‘Part IV’. ‘Part VI’ sees shivering strings, woodwind swoons and dive-bombing cello cohere with Roth's synth-scapes and time-stretched guitar. Now most of us are past this project's awful, isolating spark, its experiment in arrangement and detached improv appeals in its strange, amorphous clouds and comet-trail near collisions.