Out Trios Volume Two begins with the familiar outline of an improvising trio and immediately smudges it beyond recognition. Jeff Parker and Kevin Drumm are both credited with guitars, but their instruments rarely behave like two guitars occupying separate positions. Parker may release a clean jazz-inflected phrase, strike a chord that hangs briefly in open air, or feed a small melodic object into electronic treatment. Drumm transforms strings and signal into abrasions, low electrical pressure, metallic flutter, and broadcasts from machinery that seems to have developed its own nervous system. Michael Zerang does not stand beneath them as the drummer responsible for holding time together. He enters the same textural field with cymbal vibration, scraping surfaces, rolling drums, wooden clicks, dull impacts, and sounds whose sources are often as difficult to identify as anything produced by the electronics.
“Lacerate” occupies nearly sixteen minutes and immediately demonstrates that the title does not describe simple aggression. The music cuts, but it also examines the edges created by each cut. Drumm’s processed guitar spreads across the recording as a dense electrical environment, while Parker moves through it with phrases that occasionally retain the curved motion of jazz guitar before being swallowed by distortion or redirected into abstraction. Zerang responds not by establishing a pulse but by finding places where percussion can alter the apparent shape of the electronic mass. A cymbal roll can make a drone appear to rise; a sudden drum impact can reveal that what seemed like one continuous surface contains several separate layers.
The trio’s achievement is not call-and-response in the ordinary sense. One musician does not make a statement and wait for another to answer. Their sounds often overlap so thoroughly that cause and response become impossible to separate. A metallic scrape may have originated from Zerang’s cymbal, Drumm’s tabletop guitar, or Parker’s processing. The uncertainty forces the listener away from personality and toward collective behavior. Instead of following three soloists, one hears a temporary organism learning how its limbs operate.
This makes “Lacerate” less directional than much free jazz. There is no saxophone line or rhythmic figure leading the group toward a recognizable peak. The piece grows by changing density, grain, and internal pressure. Moments of near silence do not feel like restful spaces between events. They resemble exposed wiring after part of the machinery has been removed. When sound returns, it does not resume a previous argument. It reconfigures the whole room.
“Electric” is shorter and more transparent. Parker’s cleaner guitar language can be heard more distinctly, though it remains surrounded by tones that make every phrase unstable. His relationship to jazz tradition is crucial because it gives the record an intermittent memory of harmony and line. Even a few gently placed notes can imply an enormous musical history before Drumm’s electronics distort the context around them. Parker does not defend jazz language against noise. He allows it to become another vulnerable material inside noise.
Drumm’s work is equally important because he refuses the guitar’s ordinary social role. The instrument is not there to provide riffs, accompaniment, harmonic direction, or recognizable virtuosity. It becomes an electrical source capable of producing friction, frequency, and material resistance. His sounds often seem impersonal, but their placement is highly sensitive. A burst of static may appear brutal in isolation, yet within the trio it can function as shading, interruption, or a wall against which Parker and Zerang discover new contours.
Zerang faces the unusual problem of playing percussion in music that neither requires meter nor leaves him an obvious foreground. His solution is to treat the drum kit as a collection of surfaces rather than one integrated instrument. He can produce deep resonance without suggesting a beat, or use a series of light taps to give electronic noise a temporary skeletal structure. His restraint is as important as his activity. He does not attempt to prove that an acoustic drummer can overpower amplified electronics. He searches for sounds capable of entering them.
“Onslaught” carries the record’s most openly violent title and the greatest concentration of pressure. Yet even here the trio avoids continuous maximum volume. The onslaught comes through unpredictable accumulation. Electronic tones thicken, percussion grows more physical, and Parker’s guitar moves between compact figures and eruptions whose edges blur into Drumm’s signal. The music can feel less like three musicians attacking than like three separate weather systems colliding over one small area.
The track reveals why some listeners may hear the album as static or indulgent. Its transformations are rarely announced through obvious thematic changes. The trio can remain inside one family of textures for several minutes, asking the listener to notice variations in pressure rather than melody. Those expecting improvisation to produce escalating solos or dramatic conversational turns may hear only abrasive drift.
But the drift is not empty. The musicians continually negotiate proximity. One sound may mirror another, crowd it, carve space around it, or make it appear to change source. The pleasure lies in these minute shifts of relationship. A drum resonance seems to become part of an electronic drone; a guitar tone develops the dry attack of percussion; a cymbal scrape takes on the pitch behavior of a synthesizer. Instrumental identity becomes porous.
“Miss Big Meen” closes the album with a title that sounds playful beside the severity of the music. Its ten minutes contain some of the record’s most spacious interaction. Parker’s lines occasionally emerge with enough clarity to suggest a melody trying to survive inside a damaged communication system. Drumm answers with shapes rather than notes, while Zerang alternates between delicate activity and heavy punctuation. The trio sounds less confrontational here, though not more conventional. The final piece allows more air to circulate through the circuitry.
That air reveals the album’s relationship to Chicago’s broader experimental culture. Parker stood between Tortoise, Isotope 217, jazz ensembles, and the AACM-adjacent improvising world. Zerang belonged to a deep lineage of Chicago percussionists able to move through free jazz, theatre, world traditions, and collective improvisation. Drumm connected tabletop guitar, electroacoustic improvisation, noise, and the severe reduction of sound to signal and texture. Their meeting is therefore not a genre crossover arranged for novelty. It reflects a city where post-rock, improvised music, electronics, jazz, and noise had already been exchanging methods for years.
The Atavistic Out Trios series formalized that exchange by placing unusual three-person combinations inside the open architecture of the trio. Volume Two is especially successful because it does not resolve the differences among its players. Parker remains capable of lyricism, Drumm continues dissolving instrumental identity, and Zerang keeps acoustic gesture physically present. The record gains energy from their refusal to meet at one safe midpoint.
Its title may imply that this is simply the second installment in a series, but the album feels more self-contained than that numbering suggests. The four pieces form one forty-five-minute investigation into how much instrumental identity can be erased before collective identity disappears as well. The trio repeatedly approaches that boundary. At times the sounds fuse into one dense body; at others, Parker’s guitar, Drumm’s electronics, and Zerang’s percussion separate briefly enough for their individual histories to become visible.
The recording quality is central to this effect. Todd A. Carter’s engineering and mixing preserve detail without cleaning away abrasion. Quiet sounds retain physical presence, while dense passages remain layered rather than collapsing completely into one block. Parker’s subsequent editing and remixing suggest that the final album was not merely a neutral document of spontaneous performance. Improvisation continued into post-production, where duration, sequence, and sonic relationships could be reconsidered.
This does not betray the supposed purity of live interaction. It extends the trio’s logic. Just as the musicians treat their instruments as unstable sources, the recording itself becomes another instrument whose material can be shaped. The final object preserves spontaneity without pretending that spontaneity must remain untouched.
Out Trios Volume Two is difficult because it refuses to explain where attention should settle. There is no lead voice, reliable beat, central motif, or emotional narrative guiding the listener. Its violence and beauty exist in timbre, proximity, and the temporary agreements formed among sounds that might otherwise repel one another. The record asks for a kind of listening closer to observing matter under pressure than following a composition from beginning to end.
For those willing to enter at that level, the apparent chaos becomes surprisingly intimate. Every scrape, electrical bloom, drum resonance, and wounded guitar phrase represents three musicians listening closely enough to surrender control without surrendering responsibility. The music may sound as though it is generating itself, but that illusion depends upon exceptional attention. Parker, Drumm, and Zerang do not tame the noise. They discover the social life already moving inside it.
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