Canadian filmmaker Michael Snow's most famous works include the avant-garde classics Wavelength, from 1967, and 1964's New York Eye and Ear Control. The latter famously incorporated a soundtrack specially recorded by leading lights of the New Thing including Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Sunny Murray and others. It's little surprise, then, that Snow is also a pianist of some repute with a decidedly experimental bent. In fact, listening to these intense duets with Chicagoan powerhouse reedsman Ken Vandermark, it's actually a wonder Snow isn't better known as a musician. There's a restless intellect at work on the keys swiftly hopping from one idea to another and proving more than a match for Vandermark's bravura performance. Snow's flow of fleet-footed imaginative gambits provokes a combative snarl from Vandermark, with the bass clarinet squeezing out sharp, lemon-faced sourness and the tenor sax huffing up great breezeblocks of heaviness. It's by no means an easy listen but, if you like hearing brains whirr in real time, it could be your bag.