Nels Cline/Tim Berne/Jim Black: The Veil

They’ve gone by Sons of Champignon as well as BB&C. They have lent their musical expertise to names like Bloodcount, John Zorn, Satoko Fujii and Wilco over the years, and the idea of their names’ sharing a stage has got to produce euphoria for those reared on downtown improvisational jazz-noise. Nels Cline, Tim Berne and Jim Black stormed Zorn’s club, The Stone, in July of 2009 on an unnecessarily muggy night, bringing a guitar/saxophone/drums/laptop combination set to burn the perimeter and make the audience forget about the heat. The Veil goes everywhere in its 58 minutes, trading rawk riffs with fluttered, sputtered seizures that make you almost think the disc has an encoding error. Other times, Black’s laptop summons a ghost or two to give the program an extra disembodied feeling. If you pass out while listening to this album, chalk it up to second-hand heat stroke.