The composer Erik Satie, a musician the instrumental five-piece Balmorhea are no doubt familiar with, once famously talked of the need to create music that would fill in the awkward silences between party guests. What is less quoted is the second half of that statement where Satie voiced a desire for his music to “neutralize the street noises that indiscreetly force themselves into the picture”.

That’s as fitting a description as any for Balmorhea, who create music which is polite, peaceful and at times almost challenging in its very quietness. Yet their music never slinks into the background or settles for inoffensive tastefulness. What they create is never merely a backdrop to a dinner party or pretty incidental music, but something which is totally immersive and involving, and on a track like Coahulla, grandly cinematic.

All is Wild,All is Silent, their third record, draws on both their backgrounds as classically trained musicians and an interest in the settler history of their state; the title is taken from a letter written by colonist William B. Deewes. It is a record of real ebb and flow, building up to crashing crescendos and thick texture before receding to skeletal form, toying with silence and utilising space to evoke a landscape of featureless beauty. Most songs rise and fall multiple times, effectively using space as part of their palette.

There is a soothing quality to Balmorhea’s music that the first syllable of their name hints at (though their name is actually pronounced ‘bal-moor-ay’) which makes them a far less visceral proposition than, say, fellow Texans Explosions in the Sky, thought they share an emotional quality with that group. The slightest touches here are never wasted; from the way Nicole Kern’s cello weaves its way into March 4, 1981 to the symphonic heights of Elegy and Rememberance, there is nothing out of place.

All Is Wild, All Is Silent is currently supplemented by a remix album featuring reworkings by the likes of Tiny Vipers and Helios as well as some lesser-known friends of the band. While unavoidably patchy and feeling like an add-on, which of course it is, overall it does a good job of demonstrating how varied Balmorhea’s reference points are and how their music is malleable enough to be moulded into everything from noisy shoegaze drone rock to the kind of futuristic ambient energy found in Rafael Anton Irisarri’s take on Harm and Boon.

Eluvium probably stretch the minimalist tendencies of Balmorhea too far; the first of the seventeen minutes of their remix of two songs Settler/March 4, 1831 is so sparse as to be barely perceptible. But it’s fascinating to hear how Coahulla can be turned into two completely different creations by The Fun Years and Library Tapes respectively, and how none of the remixes lose something of that serene beauty that makes All Is Wild, All Is Silent such an engaging listen.