Three-Layer Cake are an improv trio, whose collective musical roots can be traced back to the early 1980s US hardcore punk movement. Former Iggy and The Stooges bass player Mike Watt was a key member of the Minutemen and later fiREHOSE, while Mike Pride has played drums for punk legends Millions Of Dead Cops (MDC) and as part of one of free jazz composer Anthony Braxton's numerous ensembles. Outside his own Seabrook Power Plant trio, the group's guitarist and banjo player Brandon Seabrook has also been called upon by Braxton.

Musically there is more of the latter than the former at play on Stove Top, where spiky power chords are replaced with bouts of floating sporadic improv, some of which bond together to form more structured passages of gallivanting interplay. Created during lockdown by sending music files to each other via the Internet, the editing that was involved remains a strong presence throughout.

On the extended ‘Tiler’ Seabrook's gnawing banjo jousts with Pride's glistening glockenspiel for a track that fittingly wades into Frank Zappa's compositional terrain, with echoes of Hot Rats and his later Synclavier work subliminally seeping through the sturdy rhythm wall of bass that Watts has erected around them. Equally involved is the shorter ‘Ballad Of The Gobsmacked’ with its hints of electric era-Miles snaking through as Seabrook's feverish guitar picking slowly scythes the session down. There is, however, little here that sounds fully formed, as though these are germs of ideas for a project that has yet to properly evolve into something special. In the meantime, here's hoping Three-Layer Cake will continue to cook together (either online or in a studio space) and that their next batch will rise successfully.