With Asian Fields Variations, released by ECM Records, Louis Sclavis has created a kind of thoughtful, understated chamber music, where dissonance is used to enhance melody and emotion. Together with his long-term collaborators violinist Dominique Pifarély and cellist Vincent Courtois, Sclavis makes wonderful use of the deceptively genteel combination of clarinets and bowed strings. Within this framework of austere elegance, the trio produces some unexpected harmonic flashes. The result is both stripped back and very rich, with an aesthetic quality similar to that of Chinese watercolours.