Improvised Music New York 1981

The list of featured performers on this live album reads like a who’s-who of New York’s downtown avant-garde scene at the turn of the 1980s: bassist Bill Laswell, guitarists Fred Frith, Sonny Sharrock, and Derek Bailey, reedman/birdcall purveyor John Zorn, and percussionist Charles K. Noyes. Is the result a bunch of hellacious noise? Well… sort of, yes. But it’s the kind of hellacious noise that you’d expect from these musicians: intelligent, expansive, interesting, sometimes humorous.