The Rochester, NY improv-rock trio Entente Cordiale is back with more of their heavy, sprawling guitar-drone and circular riff shapes, although this time around the band (which is made up of Carbon label boss Joe Tunis along with Will Veeder and Chris Reeg) heads into some unfamiliar territory that's quite different from their previous releases. This two-disc set combines both a studio session on the first disc, and a live set from Buffalo on the second. The first, recorded in January '08, features three tracks, two of which clock in over twenty-three minutes each; the first track is a woozy, mesmeric cloud of twangy slide guitar and simple, repetitious strum that's laced with streaks of warbling feedback, guitar noise, and blurts of percussive scrape, and at the end turns into a heavy, distorted delrium of treated guitar. The Dead C are obviously a reference point for Entente Cordiale's splattery free-rock, but as this first disc goes on, new sounds emerge. The first few moments of the second track is all minimal, soft swirls of feedback, but then louder guitars enter, one of them repeatedly strumming an atonal chord, another turned into a chugging throb, and bit by bit the band piles on fx and distortion, building the sound into a thick, dark blur of abstract guitar noise and hypnotic ur-riffage that sounds almost krautrocky by the middle of the track. Shifting back and forth between softer amp-drones and heavier, more aggressive riffing, the track finally breaks apart at the end into a heap of smoldering shapeless sludge and ruined amplifiers.

It's the third track where EC reveal a new side to their sound. The first fourteen minutes crawl through a broken landscape of clattery metallic percussion, slow-motion feedback ooze and super-heavy guitar slime, their guitars initially taking shape as slow-burning chunks of drone and growing into crushing Skullflower riff and feedback chaos. But then weird samples start to appear, sounding like looped bits of old jazz buried in the squall of feedback and downtuned sludge, and later someone starts yelling gibberish over increasingly frenzied high-end noise, turning the jam into a howling mess that's more like Hijokaidan than the heavy improvised dronerock we're used to.

Disc number two is a return to their trademark sound. It's a long forty-seven minute set that appears as one unbroken track, taken from the an October 2007 show where Entente Cordiale opened up for the Yellow Swans in Buffalo. It's primo EC, moving from dreamy fractured noise-rock and wrangled feedback to hypnotic grinding drones, crushing Earth style chordblast, mutant twang like the Dead C scoring a psychedelic Western film, sheets of awesome cosmic synthesizer, huge meandering riffs, and tons of feedback. It's all quality out-rock heaviness that fans of both the Dead C and Grey Daturas/Skullflower will be into. Comes in a heavy chipboard mailer blasted with metallic spraypaint and black print.