Years before Sam Gendel was one among the principal fixtures of Los Angeles’ bubbling ambient jazz scene, he was the frontman of a quiet little outfit called Inga. Though the group barely had any releases to its name, Inga’s performances were twisting and spontaneous, as Gendel wove his way through lopsided bossa-nova patterns together with his understated, fluttering guitar technique. To observe them play was like watching a hunched caterpillar sneaking its way through the grass, each modal jump as oddly angled because it was delicately naturalistic. Since then, Gendel has primarily focused on his solo output, constructing his kooky sound world around mellowed out hip-hop beats and his psychedelic, Jon Hassell-indebted approach to saxophone. But on Blueblue, Gendel returns to the guitar as his primary vehicle once more, taking all the things he’s learned within the intervening years and yielding one among his most richly rewarding sets in the method.

Gendel has earned a fame for his ability to distill disorienting free-jazz experiments into something that goes down smoother than iced tea, but following his output can still be daunting. Between his limitless stream of collaborations and his willingness to bury a few of his best material in sprawling 3-and-a-half-hour compilations, Gendel gives the sense that music simply pours out of him—that it’s as easy for him to create because it is for us to take heed to. Blueblue, nonetheless, advantages from precision: Its 14 tracks are concise, writhing creations, often revolving around just just a few stray elements caressing against each other to construct a definite, unified sound. Recorded in a cabin in Oregon overlooking the Columbia River, Blueblue ebbs forwards and backwards like a body of water unto itself. Where Gendel’s previous work has often tended toward jarring stylistic leaps from track to trace, Blueblue stays satisfying by sticking with its calm state of mind, as Gendel dives in to see just how much he can find.

Born from a collaboration with a Japanese clothing company that works with traditional sashiko embroidery, each track of Blueblue is titled in kanji after a unique stitching pattern inside the style. Though this titling scheme comes off more like a drained aesthetic appropriation, the music itself is executed way more gracefully. Where on previous albums Gendel would often push his squiggling saxophone lines into as many atonal places as he could take them without totally killing the vibe, here his guitar playing is soothing, even inviting, in its softly melancholic strum. “Tate-jima (縦縞, vertical stripes)” opens the record on an intimate note, as Gendel’s unadorned guitar inches along as if he were playing it lying on his back, his eyes grazing the bedroom ceiling. Even on minimal tracks akin to this, there’s a textural coarseness to the sound, pulsing with a cassette-tape warmth without losing its bassy, hypnotic depth.