MIKE SOPKO/BILL LASWELL/TYSHAWN SOREY

"The Upward Collapse" commences with the guitarist's razor-wire power chords while Sorey delivers frenetic rolls and crashing cymbals. Laswell pushes the distortion level to 11 on his bass to meet the others in a roiling sonic maelstrom. While it does project rock dynamics, the music is freely improvised in a harmonically multivalent yet unholy squall. Sopko's playing is furious, knotty, and deeply instinctive; he goes at the drummer while feeding Laswell ideas. The band delivers contrast with "Oracle." Laswell is in full dubbed-out bass mode as Sorey offers a hypnotic, circular shuffle. Sopko adds angular chords, sharp vamps, and skittering fills as Laswell employs effects pedals, adding mutant funk to the equation. In spots it recalls (aesthetically) the dark, spacy trance music offered by Robert Fripp on the title cut of Exposure. At 14 minutes, "Incantation" is an in-the-moment composition rendered suite-like by its many phases. A striated ambient entry gives way to a slippery groove asserted by Sorey. Laswell plays a repetitive bass pattern while Sopko shapes fragmented and extrapolated chord voicings underneath. Four minutes in, the snare and guitar delay ratchet up the intensity level. Sopko introduces violent scalar shifts and distortion before erupting into an industrial strength solo, then fades into a dubby backdrop before he re-emerges to shatter the proceedings as Sorey goads him on. On Common Ground juxtaposes riffing with instrumental and sonic abstraction, nocturnal atmospheres, brittle tension, canny improvisation, and explosive moments of jazz-rock formalism. The inspiration Sopko took from Arcana in the 2000s is fully realized in the company of Sorey and Laswell. They function as co-leaders rather than a rhythm section. and offer the guitarist musical glimpses and nuances that evolve into surprising group statements. Together this trio delivers an abundance of creativity driven by massive firepower.

Thom Jurek (courtesy of the All Music Guide website)

This recording is not simply a proverbial meeting of minds, but one in which the minds in question seem to think and act as one. Even in "Upward Collapse" where the music, taking a cue from the relative conundrum of its title, makes its crenelated way through melodies and harmonies from guitar and bass and that seem to pull in divergent directions, with clash of cymbals and the rattle and hum of drum skins, all the pieces falling from the catastrophic "collapse" seem to align together and spin hypnotically like concentric crop-circles in time and space.

Natural and synthesized sound can make strange bedfellows in the hands of novitiates, but here all sonic effects are moulded in a sculptural manner ["Parascience"], not the least because each musician brings his own kind of grizzled gravitas to the central idea of each piece. This, of course, does not preclude where improvisations may go, but because each musician is "singing from the same score-sheet" the results are, magically, disturbing enough to unsettle the conventions of the listeners' minds so as to provoke acceptance of - at times - a music born of the dissonance of symmetry, as in "Oracle". Raul Da Gama (courtesy of the JazzDaGama website)