The peaks ofTransverse, of which there are many, arrive when it's barely possible to detect a human hand at work amid the fracas. At times it sounds like a group of machines engaged in an uneasy standoff on stage, about to push each other over the edge. This is a live recording, captured on tape atMute'sShort Circuit Festival in May 2011, performed by Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti (Throbbing Gristle,Chris & Cosey,Carter Tutti) and Nik Colk Void (Factory Floor). Unusually, for a live recording, there's a transformative energy at work here, akin to the rare sense of magic you sometimes get at shows. The kind where everyday worries slip out of your mind, where the part of your brain that flips into figuring out what the musicians are doing on-stage is dislocated, where fanciful notions of music being some kind of "higher power" don't seem so silly after all. This might be a place they never return to-- plans for the trio to work this way again don't look promising according to a recentinterview. For the moment, we should just be grateful they left this document behind.

It makes sense that Void would find her way to Carter Tutti, especially as the nascent Factory Floor records owe a considerable debt to some of the pair's early Chris & Cosey recordings. Check out the stringy electro backing and darkly moaned female vocals of"Love Cuts" fromSongs of Love and Lust-- both strands Void and her band would prominently thread into their sound several decades later.Transverse doesn't go down that route; instead, it bears more of a resemblance to the harshly processed machine noise of Chris & Cosey'sTrance record from 1982. But it's a fatuous task to draw too many comparisons here, as the four tracks on this record, all coming in around the 10-minute mark, don't feel like a world too many people have inhabited before. It's both loose and rigid at the same time, with stringent 4/4 beats providing the backing for some increasingly inspired guitar and electronic work from the trio.

Talking about this as a collection of individual "songs" feels wrong. Instead, each piece picks up where the last left off, with short breaks for audience applause in-between. It's a testament to how absorbing it gets that the applause often feels like an intrusion. When the pulsing thug-beat of "V2" gets to its all-consuming peak, where it feels like a giant robot gone haywire, stomping on skyscrapers and crushing them to dust, it's easy to blank out the fact that other people were there to witness this recording. In many ways this feels like the true promise of industrial music being capitalized on, before it got utilized as a scare tactic to lure in impressionable mall-goth teens. But onTransverse there's something distinctly unpleasant, something downright nasty, worming its way through the tracks. It's there in the piercing, eardrum-perforating electronics of "V1", and it’s there in the lethargy-fueled "V4", which sometimes resembles rotten sewage slowly pumping through a drainpipe.

There are moments of beauty here, too. The shortest track of the bunch, "V3", is the lightest of the four, with a treated female vocal (either Void or Tutti, it's impossible to tell which) veering close to the kind of seraphic mannerismsKarin Dreijer Andersson often displays. It's a welcome dip into serenity, a relief from the all-conquering storm brewing elsewhere. That's part of the great strength ofTransverse. There’s subtlety and force vying for air, with all three players possessing an intuitive knack for knowing when to turn from one to the other, and knowing how to prevent the intricacies from getting lost when the dial bleeds into the red. These tracks come entirely from improvisations, with barely any practice beforehand. But the level of detail in the electronics-- from tiny, meticulous twists to vast plates of metallic sound-- makes that claim feel like a deception. Most people who hear this won't have been at the show. Most people who hear this will wish they were. But, like all great live albums (Live at the Apollo,Double Live,After Dark), it will make you eternally thankful that someone had the foresight to hit the record button.