Though busy soloists, collaborators and members of other groups such as Phosphor with Annette Krebs and Axel D�rner and Fraktales with bassist J�rgen Morgenstern, multi-instrumentalists Michael Renkel and Burkhard Beins tend to take their time between records; the two began working together in 1989, and lohn & brot ("wage & bread") is the only proper sequel to their 1999 double-disc, M�wen & Moos. "Activity", however, abounds on this release, the results sounding as many hands in realization of a Cage-like construction in metal � and wood, stone, manipulations and nylon strings.

A significant augmentation of the duo's former exclusive explorations of acoustic guitar and percussion, lohn & brot is a 71-minute untethered pool of ideas. Building a path from free musical association on "Arbeit: Material", they move from the scraping sounds you hear when scrubbing charred eggs out of your breakfast pan, to lightly-booming tom-tom, chimes and deep, resonating bells before momentarily nesting on a nostalgic interlude of Renkel's Spanish guitar and Beins' unaffected kit. They frequently turn sonic pages as their whims dictate: Renkel sets aside his six string as haunting dulcimer plucks, melodic percussive wobbles and more dragging fingers invade; rocks strike together like flint searching for fire under groaning low-frequency saws; a churning drone of bowed chromatic clusters builds along-side a mechanical, whirring monstrous howl, both dissipating to reveal tensing sine waves.

Renkel and Beins continue to attack with both extended acoustic ideas and real-time electronic enhancement/reduction of source material to emulate church organs, space-age lap steel, gone-mad music boxes, broken Gamelan melted into guided electro-static ("Station: Prozess"), creaking houses (and the tornadoes that plague them) and nocturnal desert sound-scapes ("Passage").

Whether engaged in Duchampian re-appropriation of junk materials or inspiring interest from simple strums and tapping claves, Renkel and Beins are fantastic ringleaders that can ground their misfit circus into peaceful reflection, then incite bedlam � then back again.