This is an excellent and intense duet album between Otomo Yoshihide on electric guitar and Paal Nilssen-Love on drums and percussion. The music is broken up into two lengthy improvisations, "Cat" and "Dog" which give the great guitarist and drummer plenty of room to stretch out and play some extraordinary sounds that run the gamut from free jazz to post rock and industrial noise. "Cat" open with raw and scouring soundscapes, feeding back into silence and invoking quick bursts of drums. The music is purely in the moment with massive blocks of guitar crashing up against dexterous percussion, blasts of feedback is punctuated by rolled drumming, colliding as if in a particle accelerator, creating new sub-atomic particles of sound and motion. The music ebbs to an ominous quiet, with skittish percussion and ever changing tones of electric guitar. This spare section, the eye of the musical hurricane, shows that these musicians are not just out to destroy, but also to create with the utmost restraint, spare tones, chimes and rings. The speed of their interactions begins to rise despite the subtlety, soon regaining the original intensity with whip cracks of electricity meeting barreling drums, bringing the music to a concluding section of beautiful violence. "Dog" is simply over the top, ending with a squall of guitar feedback and slash and burn percussion the needs to be heard to be believed. The dynamic nature of the music is also on display throughout the performance, with the music moving from the aforementioned tempest to periods of relative calm. At one point Oshihide holds a brain scrambling tone on his guitar almost begging the question, what will happen first, will he move on after this gleeful blast of noise, or will the listener blink first and lunge for the stereo to turn down that withering burst of pure energy? Although there are solo sections on this album, it's when the two musicians are working together, completely free from any preconceptions that the music truly shines. They will push each other further on with the Oshihide's limitless technique on the electric guitar which is met by the drummer's massive and bottomless idea about the role of a percussionist.
19th of May 2016 bandcamp.com
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