Star-Spangled Voltage captures the first meeting of Mette Rasmussen (alto saxophone) and Paul Flaherty (alto & tenor sax). Providing connective tissue behind the drums is frequent collaborator to both saxophonists, Chris Corsano, who also recorded and mixed the album. Long-time purveyors of the hated music, Flaherty & Corsano began playing together in 1998. A whole slew of records and tours followed, both as a duo and in collaboration with people like Joe McPhee, Thurston Moore, Heather Leigh Murray and Christina Carter, Tony Conrad, and Jim O'Rourke, among others. Rasmussen and Corsano are a newer duo, with their first meeting in 2013 being released on Relative Pitch Records as All the Ghosts at Once. But it wasn't until June 2014 that these three fire musicians found themselves under the same roof, which they would quickly proceed to blow right-the-hell off the joint. The near-telepathic connection between the three isn't something you'd expect from the first meeting of such disparate histories, but why look a gift-horse in the mouth? Flaherty's free-form gale forces and tear-jerking cries have been heard blowing in and out of his native state of Connecticut since the early '70s. In true DIY fashion, he self-released his first record, Orange-In The Midst of Chaos in 1978. Danish-born, Norway-based Rasmussen has fewer records under her belt, but in recent years she has stormed the European scene, whether it be as a soloist, in trio with Alan Silva, or in Mats Gustafsson's Fire Orchestra. Here, Rasmussen plays with pitch-wisdom well beyond her, or most anybody's, years while Flaherty unleashes with all the screaming exuberance of youth; and the two continually snake lines around Corsano's blasts as he moves between time-keeping and time-destruction. There's plenty of all-out, high energy playing on Star-Spangled Voltage, but there's also an underlying sensitivity to musicality and collective sound, so the proceedings never turn into a battle of egos. And the group has freely improvised/spontaneously composed architecture, breaking down at times into solos and duos. 'Salt', a duet between Rasmussen's prepared-sax and Corsano's bowed metal, builds an alien inner-ear landscape of difference tones, unisons and near-unisons to end side A. The album closes with a sax duet, 'In the Light of Things,' with Rasmussen and Flaherty already sounding like old friends.