Ilan Manouach is from Athens, Greece where the album was recorded last year while Gilles Mortiaux is from Brussels, Belgium. The two meet frequently to play live as Regular Rules often augmented by a drummer that is disappointingly not featured on this recording. For the most part, the six untitled tracks see Ilan’s sax travel through squawked freneticism to flailing squeals that are almost totally unyielding to any pressure towards tonality. Instead, his congenital spasms are only controlled by occasional attempts at imitating Mortiaux’s guitar that proves the most versatile of their limited sound sources throughout, which also regularly include backdrops of classical tape recordings of melodramatic strings to operatic soloing seemingly played from a delayed varispeed reel-to-reel set-up. Consequently, the guitar fills most of the recording, springing nimbly from foreground to background and vice versa as it cycles through various modes from jazz twiddling through scratchy scraping to low end power chords.

The recording itself is remarkably clear and punchy for free jazz improv, and would arguably benefit from something like a bit of background hiss to subtly dampen the overall sound that can often feel like an intense white light pointing straight inside you. And the addition of the drums that feature in their live incarnation would also help add some edging to their otherwise scattergun scrawls.

Although, one passage in the middle of the second track does gain power with repeated listens, where a treated loop of a baby crying is accompanied by slow, low chugs from a guitar and alto wailing that build into a terrifying siren, this is just one of too few moments that provide respite from uncontrasting tourettic scribbles. As it is, the minimal instrumentation is most stimulating on the first listen when the violence is at its most surprising.