There are trios, and then there’s PURPLE TRAP - not a name, but a warning. Imagine a cosmic séance between a shaman, a warlock, and a thunderstorm, and you’ll start to get a sense of what’s happening in The Stone, a long-delayed document of a one-night stand that sounds like it might have lasted for centuries.

Recorded live in December 2005 at John Zorn’s mythically cramped (and now sadly closed) venue The Stone, this performance captures three musical titans - Keiji Haino, Bill Laswell, and the late Rashied Ali - at the height of their chaotic communion. A previously unreleased beast now unearthed, The Stone was first exhumed in rough form by Laswell for his Bandcamp followers in 2023. Karlrecords, ever the lovers of elegant ferocity, have now given it a full vinyl resurrection: mixed, mastered, and - crucially - unleashed.

This isn’t just free improvisation. This is free combustion.

From the first lurching groan of “Part I”, Haino’s guitar is less an instrument than an exorcism tool. He moans, howls, and mangles the air - his voice threading through the feedback like smoke in a burned-out cathedral. He doesn’t so much “play” guitar as wrestle with it, dragging out psychic debris and radiating it with abandon.

Laswell, that bass sorcerer of a thousand sessions, stands tall in the maelstrom. He’s not holding things down - he’s mutating them. You can hear the dub-wise instincts slither beneath the noise, his low end not anchoring the ship but warping the gravity field around it. He’s not so much the rhythm section as the event horizon.

And Ali - oh, Rashied Ali, the spirit drummer, the volcanic whisperer of the Coltrane cosmos. His kit sounds like it’s haunted: at times murmuring like leaves in a fever wind, at others galloping like a herd of elephants with something to prove. He’s not keeping time. He’s bending it, fracturing the pulse like a hall of mirrors, then reassembling it mid-fall.

The seven tracks (six on wax, one digital-only like a spectral encore) are all titled “The Stone, Part X”, but this is no static monolith. It’s more like a meteor cracked open mid-air. Part III might seduce you with its flickering restraint, while Part IV drags you bodily into a furnace of ecstatic dissonance. There’s humor too - buried in the absurdity of it all, like laughing in the eye of a sonic hurricane.

This isn’t jazz. It’s not noise, rock, or ambient either, though it contains their bones. It’s an eclipse. A one-off ritual only made possible by the strange geometry of these three intersecting orbits - reuniting seven years after their first and only album, a return never meant to last, and all the more powerful for it.

There’s a touch of absurdity in waiting twenty years to hear this live spell properly mixed. But maybe time had to catch up with it. Maybe the tape had to age like wine - or ferment like prophecy. Now, with new ears and a slightly more apocalyptic world, *The Stone* sounds not like a relic, but a manifesto.

This is not music to like. It’s music to surrender to. If you’re lucky, you’ll come back changed.
If not, you’ll at least come back with your eyebrows singed.
Highly unstable. Highly recommended.