Barre Phillips’ range of collaborators has included Leonard Bernstein and Evan Parker; Motoharu Yoshizawa, who died in 1998, played with Keiji Haino, Derek Bailey and Steve Lacy, and this duo encounter between this pair of pioneers of the double-bass as a solo instrument was recorded at Café Amores in Hofu, Japan. Yoshizawa's self-invented vertical electric bass has a chewier and more airily reverberant tone than the woodier tread of Phillips’ conventionally amplified instrument. His electric bass was also obviously wired into an electric box of tricks (what exactly, I wouldn't like to guess), that allowed him to throw filtered fragments of sound around the hall; at times stabbing and brittle, at others ambient and sluggishly fading away. Their first improvisation clocks in at a whopping 55 minutes, but I happily immersed myself inside a journey that opens with the pricked heat of leapfrogging pizzicatos and gravitates towards an ever more lyrical and soulful core. A second 20-minute piece serves up a more compressed version of the same obsessions; great album, terrible title though.