This latest batch of releases from Lithuanian label NoBusiness (as part of their ongoing partnership with Japanese imprint Chap Chap) revives two extraordinary performances from the mid-to-late 1990s Japanese free jazz/improvised music scene.

The first (recorded live at C*S*Aka Renga, Yamaguchi City) features celebrated pianist Yuji Takahashi, who was an early experimenter with computer music, together with percussionist and drummer Sabu Toyozumi who has collaborated with leading Western free jazz and avant-garde groups, including members of Chicago's AACM. The two long pieces played here – ‘Lovely Silver 6,000 km’ and ‘Shoulder Blade And Hip Joint’ – are complex and involving as the players circle around each other, with Takahashi's classically stabbed keyboarding weaving through Toyozumi's energetic and erratic patterns of percussion – with the occasional blown wind effect thrown in for good measure. Of the two performances it is the latter that makes the most impact, accelerated by Toyozumi's opening barrage of percussive clatter and bang, that gradually retreats as Takahashi's icily edged piano playing slinks in. Beautifully balanced and exquisitely played, the piece is a fine example of experimental music at its most abstract and daring.

Unlike the wild percussion and surgical piano playing of Toyozumi and Takahashi, the second Chap Chap release is more recognisable as free jazz – or is it? Recorded live at Café Amores, Hofu City, Japan, Mototeru Tagaki's growling tenor sax and Choi Sun Bae's squealing trumpet (both musicians are pictured below) salvos immediately bring to mind a jam between Albert Ayler and his brother Donald as they roar and roam around each other. They are later joined by percussionist Kim Dae Hwan whose hypnotic entrance on ‘Natural Sound’ upends any pre-conceived theory that his fellow players are in sole charge of the session. Here, Sun Bae's thoughtfully thrummed hand drumming and cymbal splashes evoke echoes of traditional Japanese temple music, superimposed over, what might be, a fleeting salutary reference to Hamid Drake.

The energy and delicacy of the group's brass and percussion juggling comes to a mind-blowing climax on ‘Step By Step’ where the trio, like some sonic interpretation of a Hermann Nitsch performance art happening, impale and effectively flay back the idea of free jazz to its quivering core and leave it to hang in the air – as gradually the obviously astonished audience nervously applaud what they have just witnessed.