Recorded live at the June 2006 Jazz à Poitiers festival, this gem pairs two extraordinary musicians in an unusual and very welcome configuration. Phil Minton - the legendary British vocalist with decades of experience exploring the outer possibilities of the human voice - meets Sophie Agnel, one of the most interesting and original voices on today's scene, though still largely undiscovered given her small discography. Her approach to piano is truly surprising: a mysterious and fascinating mixture of inside and outside techniques creating resonances, microtones, dizzying cadences, squeaking strings, and sounds that defy description.

Listening to the opening track - a kind of dance on the edge of a razor-blade - it's hard to identify what sounds you're hearing. Minton creates a whole dictionary of breaths and stammerings, while Agnel's piano strings are bowed, resonated, plucked and struck, leaving you puzzled how all these sounds can emerge from just two hands. As Dan Warburton noted in The Wire: "It's often hard to believe that such a wide range of sonorities could come from just one instrument, let alone be produced by one pair of hands in real time."

Minton is such a distinctive voice in improvised music that he tends to shine out in any ensemble, but here he's often content to hum and flutter discreetly behind Agnel's glistening curtain of harmonics. His trademark wheeze allows him to produce - and amazingly control - two pitches simultaneously. Sobbing, writhing, purring, always in his particular style, though here more introspective than elsewhere.

One thing that helps the disc succeed is the unexpected variety - every track seems self-contained and sufficiently different from the others. The third track's intricate shimmering polyphony is as complex as it is haunting. Massimo Ricci in Touching Extremes called it "one of the best piano/vocals duos that I've ever heard", praising the duo's "stunning reciprocal reactivity" and "cathedrals of emotional intensity and harmonic suspension."