"We are listening to three musicians. Not quite a trio, ­but also more than that. Evan Parker creates multiple threads in his voice and braids them together, Daunik Lazro shreds his to produce a sound that skins it, then sculpts its flayed form, and Jean-Marc Foussat brings out of the box all the voices in the world, adding a song that he diffracts, at leisure. Each musician manipulates the solo exercise in his own singular way, so that it is opened up and populated. A trio, even supposing that's what it really is, is always more than that. The third shatters the mirror-like relationship between the other two and, in any formation of this type, introduces the vanishing point of a factorial function. This feature isn't repeated with an increase in the number involved. But in this trio, beside the two saxophonists, the added presence of a electronic synthesiser, a sampler, and a voice processing device, significantly extends the sound palette. And the 'outside' is brought in.

Since the invention, in the 1960s, of free improvisation, Evan Parker and Daunik Lazro have tirelessly carved out a path, and invented new ways, sounds and symbols - a signature that has never been set in stone, as it has for their imitators. Jean-Marc Foussat had faithfully recorded them, in such close association over so many years, that his role as a sound engineer was that of a phantom musician whose presence was always with them, although he remained on the threshold. When he finally decided to cross it, it was with the invention of the tailor-made instrument mentioned earlier. Parker was also involved with the rainbow colours of Lawrence Casserley, and with Marteau Rouge and, therefore, Foussat, making a foursome. Lazro threw himself into the 'reported' atmospheres of Kristoff K. Roll; they joined their braids and their abrasions, to create sumptuous canvases, as a trio, with a third player, Joe McPhee.

The outside is what lies beyond a city. It's been a long time since Evan Parker and Daunik Lazro have crossed the walls, but here, together, in the singular arrangement mentioned before, it's quite a different story. What remains of their citadel is behind them - a blue silhouette in the mist of its confines. They venture out once more, into the village squares, into the peaceful life of a circle of dwellings, graft the elemental onto the organic, and rouse up the gathering, and the excitement. They take a step towards the disorder, face the chorus, straddling a raft of melancholies. They forget themselves and then, reborn, remember themselves again, carried back to one another by the water wheel of the outside, fed by inexhaustible springs, and regularly, sensitively and profoundly renewed. And, from the rampart of our ear, we tune the eardrum to these rumoured sounds, and in its vibration we too re-invent ourselves, disarmed before we ever knew we were battle-hardened." - Philippe Alen