When it came time to decide which CDs to include in my starters and alternates lists, there was a lot of agonizing over many of the choices. But my top choice came early and easily. In fact, it was all but determined by the end of May, after I listened to David Torn's Prezens a few times.

Unless you delve in the underground genre of experimental rock-jazz guitar, David Torn won't be a household name to you. But with his extensive work as film composer, producer and sideman, his handiwork has likely reached your ears at some point. Whether scoring movies like Friday Night Lights, sessioning for artists such as k.d. lang, adding guitar loops for David Bowie or producing for the likes of Bill Bruford's Earthworks, Torn has put his fingerprints on a lot of major projects from relative obscurity.

Projects like these leave little time for making his own records and Prezens officially marks his first solo album since 1996's What Means Solid, Traveller?, although the two SPLaTTeRCeLL albums at the turn of the millennium are essentially Torn-led projects. It's also his return to the ECM label since his avant-fusion masterpiece Cloud About Mercury from twenty years ago.

Those who have patiently followed Torn all those years will find a lot of his hallmarks in Prezens: an ambient personality clashing with his heavy-metal
side, a propensity to jam at war with his inclination to carefully construct compositions, and most of all, the imaginative textures he processes into the tracks.

At the same time, it's a big leap in Torn's evolving style. While Mercury pioneered combining the artificially created atmospherics of Brian Eno with a harder edge, the songs had a conventional progression to them. 1995's Tripping Over God incorporated more non-Western song structures, particularly East Indian. Prezens, however, retains some modality but otherwise abandons any perceivable framework in his songs. One could even say they are not really songs, but rather, collections of irregular shapes and forms.

As such, it's meant to jolt the listener out of comfort zones and long-held notions of how music is supposed to be played. There are plenty of nods to styles ranging from blues to ambient to heavy metal to Middle Eastern, but the music dwells in none of the places it references. The compositions are all very asymmetrical, but they probably weren't necessarily conceived that way.

And why is that so?

Because the album was constructed much the same way Bill Frisell's Floratone was put together. That is, the basic tracks of improvised performances were recorded performed live in the studio. Then, these tapes were later dubbed, looped and remixed, resulting in a Frankenstein of organic and synthetic music. Only here the basic tracks are laid down by an entire quartet extemporaneously playing together, i.e., collective improvisation. And Torn, who is responsible for all the post-human twiddling, brings to bear his considerable experience as a film composer, producer and sideman. It's group playing shaped into one man's vision.

The group itself provides a key reason for why this formula works: Tim Berne (saxophone), Craig Taborn (keyboards) and Tom Rainey (drums). These guys are all not only reigning masters of improvised music, but have played together with and without Torn for a number of years. The chemistry needed to pull off those basic tracks was already established long before.