An off-kilter rhythm out of West African highlife opens “Higher Levels”, and Bart Vervaeck‘s guitar threads thin microtonal lines through it that lean towards Malian desert blues, while Lieven Van Pée‘s bass bubbles beneath in a funk register. It is the second single from Collective Intelligence, the third album from Brussels quartet Echoes of Zoo, out on 2 October via Rebel Up! Records and Zephyrus Records.

The quartet formed in 2018 around saxophonist and composer Nathan Daems, who also leads Ethio-jazz five-piece Black Flower. Vervaeck and drummer Falk Schrauwen play in Ghent psych-jazz collective Compro Oro, Van Pée in jazz trio De Beren Gieren. Since the 2019 EP First Provocations, through BREAKOUT in 2021 and Speech of Species in 2023, they have built a punk-edged psychedelic jazz on Middle Eastern microtonal melody and West African rhythm.

Animals have set the terms for each record: BREAKOUT on the friction between humans and animals, Speech of Species on how species talk to one another, this one on how they move as a single body. The album’s second track is called “Wolf Pack Telepathy”, and Daems ties the “Higher Levels” title to the sophisticated ways animals communicate and coordinate as one, or “what we casually call telepathy, though that label says more about our own limits than what’s actually possible in nature.”

Stream “Higher Levels” and pre-order Collective Intelligence HERE