Tu-Ner: T1-Contact Information

After so many years crossing paths in the realm of experimental-industrial-groove-jazz-rock weirdness, it would have been more surprising if these three did not all join forces at some point. Pat Mastelotto and Trey Gunn build on a decades-long history in multiple King Crimson rhythm sections as well as their own duo called TU. Touch guitarist Markus Reuter plays with Mastelotto in the trio Stick Men as well as in their own duo called TUNER. (Gunn and Reuter have also performed the odd live double-electronic-guitar set together, just to make the web of connections complete.) All three share a taste for wildly creative explorations and are constantly chasing new collaborations like an addict desperate for another fix.

Springing from that background, T1-Contact Information plays to the most clever and ambitious strengths of all three. If the sound is full of touchstones familiar from their past histories—heavy monster grooves, extensive flights into space, abrasive sonic textures like the screams of angry robots—their adventurous chemistry keeps taking them into fresh territory with each outing and each new combo. This one is two hours of unhesitating jumps into the deep end, like the amorphous groov-a-thons or Can or electric Miles Davis gone full gritty cyberpunk.

Good luck trying to figure out which parts are rehearsed, merely sketched, or spun on the spot; they stomp and flail with equal abandon through all of it. Reuter's guitar squeals and swirls through the sky, always on the verge of unsettling. Mastelotto keeps the pounding solid as a slab of metal while finding space for his trademark squeaks and percussive allsorts. Gunn's doomy bass lines twine with the clatters in fluid step, then turn into more clouds of haze when everyone decides to float for a while. A couple spots involve playing with vocoders for a little extra dystopian edge. It's a hard-hitting vision they offer, yet always an unsettlingly fascinating one—the future is apparently loud and heavy, but always with enough primal wildness to match (if not overtake) the machines.