Improvisation is always a gamble when you commit it to tape. The spontaneity that makes a live performance thrilling can flatten out on record, leaving behind something that sounds less like a conversation and more like a long footnote. Actress and Suzanne Ciani do not fall into that trap on Concrète Waves, their surprise live album released via Werkdiscs with less than a day’s notice, capturing performances from the Barbican in London and Barcelona’s Sónar Festival.

What makes this work, and work well, is that the two artists are operating from genuinely different sensibilities that turn out to be deeply compatible. Ciani is a modular synthesis pioneer whose career stretches back to the early 1970s, when she was building sounds for commercials and Atari game consoles while simultaneously developing a body of meditative, spatially rich solo work. Actress, born Darren Cunningham, comes from a lineage of UK bass music and abstract electronics, where texture and disorientation are the point. Together they move like two people who have been finishing each other’s sentences for years, even though this is clearly a fresh encounter.

The album is structured as two extended sets, each divided into segments labeled A1 through B5 and A1 through B4, the labeling so deliberately analog-feeling it reads like a quiet joke about how carefully formatted spontaneity tends to get. The titles give nothing away and function more like timestamps than descriptions. You have to let the music tell you what is happening.

The London set opens cautiously, Ciani’s modular tones curling outward in slow arcs while Actress lays down something closer to treated noise underneath. It takes a few minutes to locate the center of gravity, and that searching quality turns out to be the whole point. By the time the London A3 segment settles into a kind of hypnotic locked groove, you realize you have been pulled somewhere specific without quite noticing the journey.

The Barcelona set has a different energy, slightly more urgent and a little more willing to let things get uncomfortable. There are passages here that feel genuinely confrontational, frequencies stacking up in ways that push against easy listening. But Ciani’s instinct for beauty keeps pulling things back toward something luminous, and the tension between that instinct and Actress’ tendency toward abstraction is where the album lives.

This is not easy listening and it was never meant to be. It is two serious artists taking each other seriously, improvising in real time with real stakes in front of real audiences. That the resulting record feels as cohesive as it does is an achievement. Press materials describe this as the first in a series of “improvised musical conversations between two avant-garde icons” from Werkdiscs, and if the rest of the series is this good, that is a genuinely exciting prospect.

Both artists will stage further performances of Concrète Waves at the Rewire Festival in The Hague in April and the Variations Festival in Nantes in November. Given how alive this record sounds, seeing it in a room feels like something worth making plans for.