Variety, luminescence and calm are his chief assets. Halfway through Mark Lockett's debut solo album there's a Robert Wyatt moment. It's not a vocal thing, because all Lockett's tracks are instrumentals, but it's the left hand of the piano doubling up a bass guitar line that recalls the English master of melancholy. The gamelan featured on maybe half the tracks is the iron type used to accompany shadow puppets. The scales are quite different of course, but Lockett exploits the harmonic tensions and surrounds the whole thing with discreet electronic ambiences.
Variety is achieved with occasional pieces for solo piano.
If you still have no clear idea what the CD sounds like, that's because it's an unusual and original melding of ideas. This is not jazz gamelan, but a composer with jazz influences writing for gamelan and rhythm section. When I first received Mark Locketts CD I was intrigued as to what the music was going to be like, as there were very Americana images on the front and back. But open the foldout booklet and play the CD and a different world unfolds. A percussion dominated music with the sounds of the Gamelan very much to the fore.