Late-night improvisation captured on a stormy November evening in an old church during the 2006 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. John Butcher's soprano and tenor saxophones intertwine with Xavier Charles' clarinet and Axel Dörner's trumpet across 51 minutes of remarkable sustained exploration that stands as one of the defining documents of contemporary European improvised music.

Tempestuous moves between the poles of calm and urgency that the setting might suggest, with the trio navigating silence and voluminous drones with masterful control. The church setting becomes an active participant - the building's ambient rattles documented alongside the storm buffeting windows outside, mediating between human and natural agencies. Each musician has achieved a purity of sound suggesting the bel canto of a sine tone, yet simultaneously explored their instruments to points where attribution becomes impossible. Finger taps and air passing through columns become central events.

One notable aspect: the exploration of beat patterns, sounds arising as two pitches move toward unison - sonic events that can't be attributed to any single player. At various points, each approaches the specific glissando of a siren amid sustained long tones, creating what one reviewer described as "an Arvo Pärt score with air-raid hardware." Butcher is associated with virtuosic ability to produce sound from the saxophone by every conceivable means - pad-popping, slapping, sucking and kissing sounds - but also with testing and exploiting acoustic characteristics of performance spaces. Charles brings woody clarinet hues and long sustained tones. Dörner's restless trumpet blurs, quavers, and portamento contrast vividly with his partners' timbres.

The result suggests an ineffable masterpiece - musical cartographers mapping alien territory. The trio lapses into silence in several places, which must have been particularly effective live as the sounds generated by the wind outside became more noticeable. Their improvisation is defined by an unhurried sense of arc with accumulated sonic events separated by pools of silence. Tensions build and release as the three make waves of skirled textures and burred breaths. Moving toward its hushed conclusion, they create a palpable sense of the collective process of shaping sound and silence into spontaneous form. This is wind music befitting a trinity, with the devil in its detail - between silence and noise, the trio transcends the limitations of our soundworld. Absolute highest recommendations for serious collectors of improvised music at its most refined and powerful.