Four experienced players from different creative music genres combine on this two CD set for seven distinctive tunes with uncommon instrumentation. Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, who moves between jazz and improvised music with the likes of Wadada Leo Smith and Mary Halvorson, joins forces with three Americans: cellist Lester St. Louis who was in the late Jamie Branch's band and bassist Joe Morris, who primrarily records as an improv guitarist and has recorded with Matthew Shipp and Ivo Perlman among many others. The wild card here is drummer Jerome Deupree, founding member of the alt-rock band Morphine.

Despite his best-known affiliation, Deupree, who has often played with Morris, eschews rock affectations, instead laying down solid cadences that reply on subtle paradiddles, rim shots and irregular ruffs plus primed cow bell and cymbal accents. Part of the uniqueness of this set however is that, unlike standard jazz accompaniment, only occasionally does the bassist connect with the drummer to create an affiliated pulse. While Morris at points vibrates a walking bass line, more often he and St. Louis singly or together squeak, whistle and buzz arco strokes, emphasized stops and pulls or emphasize col legno string strokes.

Whether it's a busy conveyer belt of rapid fire affiliated notes or languid expositions that with measured patterns extend the expositions in horizontal motion, it's the pianist who directs the program. Tracks such as "Antelope" and "Cloudland" provide the fullest focus. The latter is built around broken chord progression as St. Louis and Morris stroke and thwack their instruments' taut strings as Courvoisier unleashes unstoppable dynamics, emphasizing varied key patterns with repetition and sudden stops before processional key chording regularizes the cello and bass players' patterns. Meanwhile "Antelope" leaps along with staccato keyboard feints and forward motion as concentrated ambulation from regularized bass string accompaniment projects the theme still further out.

Preserving the quartet's jazz links, Courvoisier also provides a note perfect blues interlude as part of her melodic contribution to "Isalo" while her continuous sparkling patterns on "Mides" use sprawling key cadences to preserve a modal-jazz connection alongside the freeform and pitch vibrating narrative otherwise characterized by thinning string pinches from St. Louis and swelling pizzicato pressure from Morris.

Although an ad hoc quartet, Deupree, Courvoisier, Morris and St. Louis prove that provocative and dramatic music can result from a meeting of what could have been an oddly associated ensemble.