Originally released in 1988, this is a landmark album in free improv. Though all three have made wonderful music in other contexts, there remains something special about this particular combination of people. The tracks are pithy, some clocking in below even the three-minutes-thirty of a pop song radio edit, and by turns restrained and reckless. What unites them is an overwhelming sense of the communal and the collective, all for one and one for all, as well as a deep interest in and sensitivity to texture – pure sonics – as well as melody, harmony and rhythm. Together with the 11 tracks recorded in a Bracknell studio in 1987, this re-issue adds an epilogue: a much longer track recorded five years later in Sweden by none other than Mats Gustafsson. For The Thing's saxophonist, as his rather poetic contribution to the liner notes makes clear, it was a formative experience: a new take on the tradition of Derek Bailey, John Stevens and Evan Parker. That sense of treading a new path is also picked up elsewhere in the notes: this was a less pugilistic take on improvised music than that of Brötzmann and co. Over two decades on, then, it remains in its way an important record as well as a highly enjoyable one.