2025 stock ** "On South Bank - the most vital and essential document of Reid and Hebden's five-year partnership-- it feels clear that, at least onstage, they were finally able to go the distance. The invocation "Morning Prayer" opens slowly, circling in space with a meditative calm. For 17 minutes, the pair traces lines around the other's rhythm, Hebden's electronics and keys shaping a cradle for Reid's busy tom-and-cymbal patter, and vice versa. Back in 2006, on Volume 1, "Morning Prayer" felt slight but suggestive, as if Reid and Hebden were only testing the water; here, they're living in it. In London that night, Gustafsson was so mesmerized by the pair's chemistry that he forgot to join until the piece was done. When he finally enters, though, he fits readily, adding a strange new mix of aggression and soul to "Lyman Place". He sounds like an air-raid siren but quotes Coltrane; Reid and Hebden respond in kind, their own treatment reinvigorated by a stranger who didn't know its original bounds. "People Be Happy", originally heard on 2007's Tongues, capitalizes on that openness, too, with the trio pushing the tune's distinctive fragment of a melody into a strange, elliptical sphere. Gustafsson and Reid wind strands of sound through one another, while Hebden sits back, building a back-and-forth bed of sound upon which they both move. As accomplished with fierce, focused marches ("Untitled") as they are with open-ended textural explorations ("25th Street"), this one-time-only trio understood its own extremes-- and how to navigate breathlessly, relentlessly, and brazenly between them. As "The Sun Never Sets" progresses, Reid's fatigue turns out to be only a passing notion. Just three minutes in, he's forcing the rest of the squad to twist one of the most memorable melodies of his work with Hebden into unrecognizable patterns. He jumps from cymbals to kick drum, from toms to cymbals. Gustafsson broods, and Hebden wraps the theme in a fuselage of noise. They distend what seems like the end, stretching the coda into a slow exhalation. But as everyone else starts to fade, Reid remains, pounding his drums a little harder than you might expect after these nearly 90 bustling minutes, like he wants to keep going."