Grubbs, David & Taku Unami

***Longtime friends and now the most simpatico of collaborators, Comet Meta finds David Grubbs and Taku Unami fully in third-mind territory as they start the conversation anew after their touted 2018 debut, Failed Celestial Creatures (Empty Editions). Comet Meta grew out of concerts in Seoul, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, with ground broken for this recording on a plane 35,000 feet above the East China Sea and in a tiny Risograph studio in Tokyo where they had to be extremely quiet. Those familiar with Grubbs’s and Unami’s extensive discographies know them as folks who like to think and to make on their feet and on the run, with situation and surroundings profoundly generative. The sound world of Comet Meta ranges from pindrop twin-guitar focus (“Comet Meta” and “Nothing Left to Hear but the Night”) and Grubbs’s piano maneuvering in Unami’s electroacoustic forcefields (“Mirror Auction at Echo Decor” and the horror homage “Walking Corpse in an Old House”) to unclassifiable throbs, ceiling fans, and the distant exultation of the crowd at the New York City marathon. You would be forgiven for thinking on occasion of gossamer Gastr-isms. Comet Meta casts a hell of a previously unpronounced spell.