Live At Downtown Music Gallery

Downtown Music Gallery is a small record store in Lower Manhattan specializing in avant-garde music ranging from prog to out jazz to everything John Zorn touches. They frequently host in-store performances featuring luminaries from the scene; this disc documents the first encounter between Haino and dark ambient post-blues guitarist Loren MazzaCane, from August 1, 1992. It’s a quiet encounter befitting the very small room in which it was recorded, and brief — a single track, less than 25 minutes long. But it hovers like a shimmering cloud just a foot or two off the ground, each man taking turns providing structure to underpin the other’s explorations, whether it’s a simple blues riff or a knotty but repeated melody, and at points they embark on some truly beautiful improvised duet passages.