Sophie Agnel / Michael Zerang: Draw Bridge

Draw Bridge showcases yet another unlikely but rewarding product of the well-trodden thoroughfare between France and Chicago. Under the aegis of the Transatlantic Bridge initiative, now in its 12th year, pianist Sophie Agnel enters the studio with percussionist Michael Zerang for a series of nine collective duets. The pair traffics in a unconventional language wrested from prepared piano and an augmented drum kit, a music that intrigues as much as it unsettles.

Agnel's dissatisfaction with the limitations of the tempered keyboard drew her to alter the conventional sound by placing bolts, screws, rubber erasers, plastic balls and a host of other objects over and between the strings. Rather than John Cage's prescriptive preparations, she adapts in real time, developing a personal vocabulary for which words like clanks, rattles and taps prove entirely inadequate. As she has shown elsewhere, notably with English saxophonist John Butcher, she possesses a superb ear for just the right noise at just the right time.

That sensibility finds a natural counterpart in American drummer Zerang. Better known for his sojourns in free jazz cauldrons such as Peter Brötzmann's Chicago Tentet and Joe McPhee's Survival Unit III, he nonetheless glories in the mutant textures and alien resonances he teases from an extended kit, attacked with all manner of implements, from scrapers to metal rods. Together they serve rarefied fare in which balance, placement, and intuitive response determine whether an exchange coheres or dissipates.

Whether evoking a gamelan orchestra bumping down a Parisian boulevard or a hailstorm in a scrap iron yard, this twosome hits paydirt more often than not. While in a broad sense the nine cuts coalesce as a single continuum, at the micro level they contain multitudes. Compare the hyperactive scuttling and voice-like timbres extracted from drum heads on "Cable-Stayed," with the spectral shimmer and insectoid buzzes of the reflective "Vertical Lift," to take two extremes. Fragments of rhythm only surface on the emphatic tumbling closer "Cantilever," where they suggest both the culmination of an arc and the persistence of an unfinished conversation.