This is the follow up to the idiosyncratic New York-based drummer Tom Rainey's long awaited debut recording Pool School from last year. It's the same trio line up with Rainey also sharing writing duties with the guitarist Mary Halvorson and his regular partner, the ex London-based, Brooklyn resident tenor/soprano saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock. The guitar-sax-drums combination might entertain comparisons with Tim Berne's groundbreaking Big Satan, Rainey's most well known association that included the guitarist Marc Ducret. There are similarities with its subversive approach to form and time, but Halvorson especially has her own generation's restless socio-cultural impulses: an effects-laden palette means anything from slide guitar through to fuzzbox slash chords, infl uenced by recent developments in Americana, post- and undergroundrock, country and metal as well as the abstract outer limits of improv guitar in the spirit of a Fred Frith or Derek Bailey. Laubrock, who's currently making a splash on the left-field New York improv scene, also feeds a wide spectrum of infl uences from past and present into her tonally fl exible improv; she can be a scurrying, atonal conversationalist with fragmented phrases of bop language passing by like dusty remembrances of the past; elsewhere ambient sighing lines contrast with raucous episodes fuelled by Evan Parker-infl uenced overtones and multiphonics.While composition and improv was a more transparent element on the debut, they are more or less indivisible on Camino Cielo Echo, titled after the drummer's hometown in Santa Barbara in LA. It's a less accessible recording for people who aren't specialist listeners, although fans of Rainey won't mind that one bit.