Dutch composer Banabila (b. 1961) has well over a hundred releases to his credit though Hidden Patterns is this listener's first encounter with his work. It seems to be a compendium of sorts, with pieces dating as far back as 2008, some of them originally from films.

The general mood is gentle ambient with a light, contemporary classical tinge. There's a lot of Badalamenti here, often bathed in Eno circa 1980, especially the work with Jon Hassell. The pieces with an electrically augmented chamber ensemble often feature violist Oene Van Geel and tend to fluctuate between the kind of moody neo-neo-romanticism heard in "indie" films nowadays with Glassian overtones. It swells with iterated strings dressed in bell-tones, subsides, disappears. Everything is rounded, cushioned, not a sharp edge within earshot. Unfair perhaps, but it's hard to describe without allusions to all the various musics of which one is reminded. At its best, as on 'Dragonfly', featuring bass clarinetist Gareth Davis, it recalls something that might have appeared on an early 90s Made to Measure album, something with just a tinge of the "exotic", say by Benjamin Lew or Hector Zazou. It all goes down smoothly, even pleasantly. If the above descriptors sound like the kind of aurae you're fond of embracing, Hidden Patterns offers a well-performed, well-recorded variation of same.