Tatsuya Yoshida's meetings with Uchihashi Kazuhisa continually and reliably are some of his most exciting projects. The Ruins drummer, a godfather of Japanese punk, has invented a musical and vocal language so unique that he's rarely far from it; the cracked and cranked prog of that longstanding duo can be heard in almost everything he does. Even the early '90s CD-R release of Ruins improvisations sounded pretty much like Ruins songs.

But guitarist Uchihashi Kazuhisa is too fleet of foot to stay in anyone else's sandbox for very long. In the 1990s halcyon days of new Japanese rock, Uchihashi played in the similarly prog-inf(l)ected power outfit Altered States and was in Otomo Yoshihide's Ground Zero, contributing blistering guitar to four of that band's releases.

For their third release of duo improvisations, Uchihashi and Yoshida collected live recordings from three dates on a 2007 Japanese tour and paired it with a DVD of video from four live shows the following year, allowing the opportunity to either shatter or labor under the illusion that there's more than two people onstage. The recording quality is great in either case, with huge, huge, warm sound and, on the DVD, multiple cameras. With Uchihashi's multiple loops and effects and finesse at quick changes, and Yoshida's vocals and talent for being Yoshida, they easily sound like a quartet much of the time without benefit of video. While Yoshida's presence is unmistakable, Uchihashi gives the music a fluidity that isn't often the aim of Yoshida's projects. Most importantly, they are both hotshot players, as is more than evidenced in these 2 1/2 hours of documentation.