London's premiere jazz percussionist meets downtown NY electronics master. Ikue hasn't been playing much drums in the last 30 years, but her approach is still deeply rooted in rhythm and texture, which makes her a perfect foil for Noble's liquid drumming. Prediction and Warning's opening track "Seismic Waves" moves through different sonic spaces like slowly cruising the short-wave radio dial, making brief stops on stations playing impossibly fantastic music. Mori's scuttling electronic chatter continually inverts on itself with Noble playing in and around her broken, truncated phrases. The continuous ruptures in time create disorienting mental states in the best possible way. I imagine time travel sounds something like this.

"Montparnasse Derailment" moves in a similar vein, with Mori's fragments of programmed beats making brief appearances amidst the fury and teasing the live drums with divisible time. Their E.S.P. is clearly working on a high level throughout, especially apparent when Noble offers cymbal feedback to augment Mori's pure sine waves. She adds other frequencies to match the rich harmonics coming from his metals until they combine into a thick, dissonant chord, perfectly melding the synthetic and human qualities of their music.

"Combustion" starts with muted Afro drum phrases that quickly devolve into rolling free form under Mori's alien landscapes. Tracks 4 and 5 reside in the lower volume register but move with frenetic precision nonetheless. The players' aesthetics really mesh and at times it's hard to discern where the sound is coming from. Elsewhere "Land of Famine" recalls the NASA voyager music released years ago with shimmering, unidentified tones of different size and shape colliding in space/time. Compared to the other tracks here it's less frantic and simply lovely sounding. The final track, "Inferno", finds fluid circuitry and clanging metals ping ponging around the stereo field with a shifting, conversational quality. It sounds somehow buzzing and watery; the possible sonic analog to the jungle floor at night. Ikue Mori is a universe of sound on her own and it's nice to hear someone integrating so seamlessly with her. Prediction and Warning is immensely musical and a curious, exciting listen throughout.