Whisker is a duo consisting of modular synthesist Ben Baker Billington and bassist Andrew Scott Young. These are two space cadets who have emerged from the burned-out basements and sweaty lofts of the midwest noise scene to become leading figures in the Chicago music community. Billington has mastered trippertronics under his Quicksails project and provided tactile drum work to the pivotal Chicago industrial collective ONO, while Young’s bass playing has graced records by Ryley Walker, Circuit des Yeux and Eli Winter. The two have previously worked together as part of the explosive free jazz unit Tiger Hatchery and the tripped-out post-Phish jazz fusion band Traysh. With Whisker, our two heroes have used their wook wisdom and seasoned musical chops to blow open the doors of improvised music.

In between making such heady music, Billington and Young have still found time to contribute immeasurably to nurturing the free music scene in Chicago; Billington has been booking shows at Elastic Arts, a local institution, for years now, and Young is both the curator of the Heavy Air Happy Hour at Cafe Mustache and a music teacher in his own right. This curatorial pedigree is on full display on Trips, the latest release from Whisker, which represents a true meeting of the minds in the Chicago freak scene. Each track is an improvised jam session with a different figurehead in the Chicago experimental scene, and each of these wildly different musicians find new ways to push the duo into the stratosphere.

The first track features legendary percussion wizard Chris Corsano, and though Corsano has only recently adopted Chicago as his homebase, he sounds as if he’s been playing with this team for years. Corsano is both one of the most respected drummers in contemporary improvised music, but in his work with Sunburned Hand of the Man and Vibracathedral Orchestra, he’s proven himself to be more than adept in bringing in-the-pocket polyrhythms and extended technique-driven textures to fried psychedelia. Corsano fits with the Whisker team like glue, and together the three whip up a bugged-out storm that’s somewhere between free jazz action painting and an ecstasy-laced light show.

The most unlikely pairing on the record is the second track, which features cellist and shortwave radio virtuoso Lia Kohl. In contrast to Whisker’s acid-washed stargazing tendencies, Kohl’s music tends to seek the cosmic in everyday sounds, like the hum of the refrigerator and the flow of indistinct chatter. But Kohl also knows how to subtly stretch her sound to far-out heights, and that craft helps take the duo to exciting, unexpected places. The meditative beauty that Kohl often brings to her work is present at the very beginning of track two, which opens with a burst of synth madness before an ambient drone comes into the forefront, providing a perfect center for the duo to play off of. Her cello takes on a singing tone that works masterfully with Billington’s cybernetic birdsong synths and Young’s percussive bass techniques.

Perhaps the wildest moments of the record come from track three, which features Norman W. Long, one of Chicago’s most singular undersung musical visionaries. On this track, Long unleashes an onslaught of drum machine programming, and the duo seems to delight in exploring its dense sonic caverns. It’s perhaps one of the few pieces of free improvisation that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Autechre mix, and it speaks to both the deep history of Black counterculture that permeates through Long’s artistic practice and to the fruits of Whisker’s ego-free fearlessness and versatility.