Things we like: Ezra Sturm/Ernesto Diaz-Infante, Lisa Cameron/Alex Cunningham, Jonathan Horne/Joshua Thomson

There's another Bandcamp Friday coming March 1, so I'd be remiss if I didn't load you up with recommendations of new tuneage, of which I have a couple.

I first became aware of the San Francisco-based experimental guitarist Ernesto Diaz-Infante via his work with Austin percussionist Lisa Cameron back in October. Since then, Diaz-Infante has released other work, including a tribute to the late saxophonist and improviser Jim Ryan. His most recent, and the first of three releases planned for this year, is The Escape, a collaboration with his son, guitarist/synthesist Ezra Sturm. (Ernesto's partner/Ezra's mother Marjorie Sturm joins on flute for one track.) Both father and son are active, busy players, Ezra laying down highly rhythmic electric drones while Ernesto explores the pure sound of his instruments, playing contrasting rhythms and textures (including slithering slide) against his son's explorations. On "Tears Before Chaos," Ezra uses a highly saturated sound to produce ringing chords which his father's acoustic scrapes and bumps against. "Safe in the Hamster Ball" finds both guitars in percussive mode, with Ezra's glisses and high register interjections approaching mania. An ever more abstract cross-generational conversation, filled with adventuresome invention.

The aforementioned Lisa Cameron and St. Louis-based violinist Alex Cunningham were at Grackle Art Gallery last April in a quartet with bassist Damon Smith and multi-instrumentalist Sarah Ruth Alexander.  The trio of Cameron, Cunningham, and Smith has previously recorded twice (Dawn Throws Its First Knife on Smith's Balance Point Acoustics label and the cassette-only Time Without Hours), but Chasms is the first release by Cameron and Cunningham as a duo. Like their live performance, the three long tracks presented here are dense soundscapes where it's hard at times -- particularly when Cameron applies her Nakatani bow to a cymbal, or Cunningham uses found objects to assault his amplified strings -- to tell exactly who's playing what. No matter. The dynamics shift from massive sound field to extreme close-up intimacy. The net effect, when the intensity is at its clangorous apogee, is the sound of a world very laboriously being turned. There is a tension here that, while it dissipates, is never released. These sound artists shake the listener out of their expectations and carry them into a dimension where friction creates light as well as heat.

Jonathan Horne is one of my guitar heroes. A purveyor of Sharrockian skronk and otherworldly inventions, he's a member of the transcontinental free jazz/hip-hop/metal juggernaut The Young Mothers; I saw him at Molten Plains Fest in December duetting with prepared guitar specialist Sandy Ewen (at the pre-show) and joining Austin drone rockers Water Damage for the festival finale. At this point he's had about ten surgeries to repair a severed tendon in his fretting arm, re-learning how to play each time with an inspiring tenacity. And he plays a Mosrite, like Nokie Edwards and Fred "Sonic" Smith. On Clandestine Flower, released last June on Personal Archives, he's paired with saxophonist Joshua Thomson from the expandable free jazz/"world music" duo Atlas Maior for a set of lyrical ambient improvised meditations, recorded inside an industrial tank. I haven't got the cassette yet, but I plan to snag one when the duo plays at the Grackle Art Gallery on March 1. They recently recorded in Austin with drummer extraordinaire Stefan Gonzalez (Trio Glossia, Dennis Gonzalez Legacy Band), and that trio, billed as Atlas Maior: Palindrome, will be at The Wild Detectives on February 29. Catch either or both shows and prepare thyself to deal with a miracle (as Rahsaan Roland Kirk once said).