Merzbow – aka Masami Akita – is the Japanese artist generally regarded as a godfather of harsh noise, responsible, since the late-1970s, for some of the most extreme sonic onslaughts ever created. He's collaborated with a host of shadowy figures on the international noise scene – including, since 2009, the Hungarian drummer Balazs Pandi. Clearly, they've got a vocabulary worked out because for the first 40 minutes of this trio date, Scandinavian saxslinger, Mats Gustafsson, isn't able to fit a sound in edgeways: Merzbow's raw, bleeding feedback and throbbing howls and roars combine with Pandi's boiling tom-rolls, metal-head double-kick barrages and bludgeoning hardcore blast-beats, to create a relentlessly intense noise-improv that makes up in pure ecstatic energy what it lacks in subtlety.

When Gustafsson does finally join the fray, his fiercely over-blown baritone skronk pushes the levels even further into the red, going some way towards fulfilling the rapprochement of noise and free-jazz first proposed by Black Vomit, Anthony Braxton's infamous 2006 collaboration with Detroit noiseniks Wolf Eyes.