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If the name 302 Acid suggests an unhealthy interest in the sound of a certain legendary Roland bass station, then forget you ever heard it. As it appears on this their debut album, there’s nothing minimalist or retro about the music of this Washington DC trio. Even Calls is a almost continuous swathe of densely arranged sound, multilayered and amniotically appealing. The swelling, substaining tones of Douglas Kallmayer’s electric double bass – sometimes bowed, sometimes plucked, always heavily treated – underpin most of these pieces. This unstinting flow of low-frequency tones serves as a rich, loamy subsoil in which the rest of the music takes root. It’s clear from the many twists and turns that live improvisation is as important as programming for 302 acid; a piece like ‘road trip to Tokyo’ incorporates lovingly nuanced percussion – all rimshots and lithe, darting hi hat fills – into a rising tide of sweetly distressed white noise. And it’s a finely calibrated dub sensibility that holds everything in place, a tuned understanding of when to drop the fader and let some space into the mix – ‘mortariggus’ is a spacious interlude that offers hovering, frippertronic drones and suggesting distant cavernous spaces with economic poise. It swings without pause into the hustling forward drive of ‘push putton’, and multitudinous clouds of sound gather again.