Nothing about the duo encounters of John Zorn and Fred Frith, neither live nor as captured on their cd The Art of Memory (Incus, 1995), is easy. They've both grown into more than noteworthy composers, but they have each held tight to their improvisatory roots. Their duet has generally been a clash of quickly-spewn ideas, but on this night they presented something more varied (although no less challenging). Frith played an electric hollow-body guitar and relied heavily on effects while Zorn at times slowed his screams and fast trills, creating wider spaces within which they could work, more of a landscape than in past meetings.

But their long relationship was still evident in the playing. Frith began one piece mimicking quite well Zorn's fast, pinched-reed flurried, to which Zorn responded with long-drawn, sustained notes. Frith then switched to sustained notes, leaving Zorn with no choice but to play lines atop. Then, with Zorn in melody mode, Frith started looping ringing lines below him. At other points, Frith laid down and looped bass parts, playing melodies and washes over them and creating a backing band for Zorn to play against. It was a generous set, varied and giving, and more musical than their previous pairings.

As a sign of the times, at least a half dozen people in the SRO crowd were holding digicams above their heads then quickly checking the display screens - the only way all but a few they could see the stage.

Following their surprisingly musical set, Zorn took the stage with Boredoms screamer Yamatsuka Eye to again subvert expectations of difficult listening. The duo created a more musical meeting than they might have in past years. Eye's sonic experiments have taken him past pure screaming energy and into more advanced methods of madness, playing with psychedelia and tribal rhythms, a sort of raving mad rave. He had with him for this set a technician ata laptop, processing reverberating tones and room-shaking booms trigered by a pair of handheld balls of mysterious origin. The effect was something like Eye inside a theremin. Jumping around, dancing and making sudden or slow movements with his hands, he created resounding, thunderous, subwoofing percussion and high-pitched interference. It made an unstable ground for Zorn, but then Zorn doesn't need a lot to go on. He screamed and sang on his sax as Eye rang and pantomimed with his bionic meditation balls.

Eye didn't stop short of screaming, of course, putting his voice through heavy effects and a plastic tube which also ran through effect while Zorn submerged his mouthpiece in a pitcher of water. While something like the duo tracks on the Painkiller box set might have been expected, what they delivered was closer to their Tzadik disc Nani Nani.

After a few pieces they brought Frith up to join them on guitar. As a trio, though, they wandered, not quite finding the fluidity that the evening's duos had shared. "All you dudes should just start screaming," came a yell from the audience from someone no doubt hungry for the sheer noise they might have perpetrated. "I think it's a good idea."