On the cover of Raymond & Marie (adorning another of the Formed label's economical yet tastefully designed digipaks), two figures (ostensibly the two individuals so coined as the album title?) clad in fireproof worksuits and cranial armor can be seen at work welding/sculpting a semi-lit metallic tube. The shot is stark, concise, literal, a picture more associated with realms industrial rather than improvisational. In this case, the image suits the music to a tee.

Sounding more like a character from a Francois Truffaut film than a group, Mersault comprise tactile sound artists Tomas Korber and two Christians, Wolfarth and Weber. The backgrounds are fairly unassailable: Korber's been quietly developing a solid rep in the improv underground via work with the Cut and For 4 Ears labels; Wolfarth recently dropped a full-length on F4E, and Weber's been a solid sessionist, part of the Signal Quintet with Korber, and becoming as integral to the "scene" as another famous Weber, Eberhard, whose graceful bass poetics have lifted many an ECM joint from anonymity.

On this, their second outing as Mersault, the group concocts an unsettling, though intermittently beautiful, triad of scrapes, gouges, cries and whispers. The entire disc is a brilliant exercise in dynamics: metal leaves rustle on concrete, sifting across dry electronic river-beds, tympani beat from out of a hollow heart. Bassist Weber has, in a short span of time, invented a unique vocabulary for his instrument-within the duration of the expansive opening piece, his trusty upright emulates a dying' giants final breaths or the shifting of desert winds. Wolfarth mangles and manipulates his "kit" in vivid fashion; he can be subtle when the time's right (particularly when Korber dusts the soundstage with a kaleidoscope of paisley effects) or outright brashy, his snares the muffled reports of distant explosions pockmarking hard-fought topographies. The trio has ensnared a true index of metals, soldered with a sureness of touch into the shape(s) of things to come.