Keith Rowe, Günter Müller, Taku Sugimoto

A document of a performance last autumn at Parisian Improv spot Instants Chavires, in which Günter Müller is flanked by two very different but distinctive users of the electric guitar. On one side of the stage is Keith Rowe, who's worked for half a lifetime to unsettle the boundaries between music and noise. On the other is the restrained presence of Taku Sugimoto, whose crabbed phrases waft above the shifting timbral networks laid down by the other two. The trio's music is dominated by rasps and scrapes, with snatches of moonlighting radio, furtive rustles in the undergrowth and troubled cloud formations. Müller drifts between abstracted interventions and nondirective percussion, while Rowe's fluttering drones swoop in and out. In contrast to such textural movement, Sugimoto's note-playing seems to involve a different vocabulary. Yet in the end, his patient exploration of single eddies in the flow of sound has him fitting snugly with the trio's emphasis on the play between movement and stillness. Sugimoto simply allows a note to hang suspended in the air, then repeats it. This is exquisitely unhurried playing, and it's the tension between this work and the more restless contributions of Rowe and Müller that makes this trio sound so good. (The Wire, Will Montgomery)