Progressive Rock
7d Media · 24 July 2026
“The ConstruKction of Light” comes second and runs five fifty, and what you hear is one man doing the work of two: Markus Reuter rebuilds on the Touch Guitars T8 the interlocking lines that King Crimson split between two guitarists, and where his hand cannot reach he invents a new one that lands in the same place. All of “Rendezvous Rodeo” was recorded in a single night, on 25 August 2025 at The Stone Church in Brattleboro, Vermont, with Trey Gunn on ten-string Warr Guitar and Pat Mastelotto on drums. It came out on 24 July on 7d Media.
The other two Crimson tracks are “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Pt. 4” and “Level Five”, and all three come from records Gunn and Mastelotto played on themselves: “The ConstruKction of Light” (2000) and “The Power to Believe” (2003). The rest of the set is just as close to home. “Firepower Coda” extends the closing improvisation of the track Sylvian and Fripp released in 1993 on “The First Day”, a record Gunn played on with Jerry Marotta on drums; Mastelotto came in for the tour that followed, and that is where he and Gunn first played together; “Kuma” comes from “The Third Star”, Gunn’s second solo album, from 1996; “Unconditional” is from Reuter’s “Falling for Ascension” (2017), and “Absinthe and a Cracker” from “TU”, the album Gunn and Mastelotto signed as a duo in 2003.
The two long pieces run back to back and account for twenty-four of the seventy-seven minutes. “Unconditional” (twelve ten) is Reuter’s composition and moves by accumulation, with a patience that concedes nothing for the first few minutes; “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Pt. 4” (twelve nine) does the exact opposite and swallows the room. Between them, “Kuma” (five twenty-one) sets the touch-guitar lines over a tabla that never stops moving, and it is the track where the smaller scale suits the trio best.
Of the eleven pieces, only three are Tu-Ner’s own and appear on none of their earlier records: “Hogtied and Slightly Slack”, “The Mechanical Bride Wore Static” and “Paper Halo Rodeo”, sixteen minutes forty between them. “Cusp” is not new material from the trio either: it is a Stick Men piece, from “Deep” (2013), credited to Reuter, Levin and Mastelotto. Tu-Ner’s debut, “T-1 Contact Information” (2023), was nine new pieces running close to two hours, between semi-prepared material and full improvisations; here the two tracks that go furthest into soundscape territory — “The Mechanical Bride” and “Paper Halo Rodeo” — are also the hardest to follow without having done your homework on the other records.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Guillem Cardós