Chris Cogburn, Bonnie Jones, Bhob Rainey

A document of two live performances by an exceptional trio of American improvisers: Chris Cogburn (percussion), Bonnie Jones (electronics), and Bhob Rainey (soprano saxophone). Recorded in April 2010 during a tour of Texas and Mexico, Arena Ladridos – Spanish for "barking sand" – captures the group at AAMP in Austin and at the Crowley Theatre in Marfa, with each concert comprising a 20-plus-minute track. Part of Another Timbre's "Silence and After" series, this release showcases three musicians with impeccable credentials creating what has been described as a "nonlinear dynamical system" of improvised sound.

Jones, a Korean-born, Baltimore-based electronic improviser and one half of the duo English (with Joe Foster), has collaborated with luminaries including Andrea Neumann and Toshimaru Nakamura. Rainey, an instructor at Loyola University of New Orleans, is best known as one of the principals of the duo nmperign alongside Greg Kelley. Austin-based Cogburn, perhaps the least known of the three at the time, served as curator of the No Idea Festival and had worked with Vic Rawlings, Tetuzi Akiyama, and Annette Krebs.

The music on Arena Ladridos operates in a zone of sustained restraint punctuated by sudden shifts in intensity. On the opener Govalle, the trio settles into what one critic described as a "quiet, yet menacing cycle" – Jones' electronics emit faint hissing drones, Rainey produces sparse airy notes, and Cogburn contributes delicate scratching and rubbing rather than conventional percussion strikes. These sounds hover in a carefully maintained equilibrium for extended periods before the group breaks free into more turbulent territories, with Rainey's saxophone oscillating wildly and Jones introducing intrusive feedback reminiscent of Nakamura's no-input mixer work.

Matthew Horne (Tiny Mix Tapes) noted that "Arena Ladridos is an aesthetic delight, an album that invites both overwrought analysis and passive splendor." Another reviewer observed the music's "unforced, unhurried, unharried" quality, emphasizing that "listening to 'Arena Ladridos' allows one, free of overt structural considerations, to quite clearly imagine oneself into a physical space, to imagine the musicians sitting there."