""I wanted this duo to sound as feral and free as I could get it," says Phil Venable, upright bassist for Tragic Assembly. Influenced by the work of Nels Cline, Masayuki Takayanagi, and Sonny Sharrock; Venable asked drummer Tommy Jackson to join him in a guitar drums duo to explore an aggressive distorted sound.

Venable, a veteran guitar player as well as bassist, turns up the distortion and volume for Orbital Decay. Using all of the guitar to produce atonal chimes and volume swells coupled with Tommy Jackson's drums creates a free jazz wallop.

Jackson, a veteran drummer in the North Carolina jazz scene, provides a ferocious swing and stability that allows Venable to explore pure sound. The four pieces on Orbital Decay run the gamut of mood and tone culminating in the end with "the sun is a ball of hate," a fuzzed out amalgamation of deconstructed melody and noise.

Titles such as "empty and burning and empty" and "broken navigation" coupled with the duo's name and album title portray a sonic world of desperation and anger, eschewing cheap and easy resolution. Ultimately, it is up to listeners to .009 determine the meaning for themselves.

The tension between repetition and improvisation is abundantly clear in Orbital Decay making the album visceral stimulating and confrontational. "Jazz, and free jazz, especially seems to bring out the over-intellectualization in people. This duo is put together to overwhelm folks on a primal level and get them out of their heads and into the moment," Venable reflects. "For some reason in my 50s, heavy drone works by Earth, became very important and I wanted to try and put that into my improv work minus the repetition of drone" "-Soul City Sounds