Issued originally on FMP back in 1975, Three Nails Left is a pioneering document of European free improvisation – a record that placed an emerging musical language under the analytical microscope. Although billed as a Schlippenbach Quartet release, Peter Kowald was a semi­permanent guest within the regular Schlippenbach-Parker- Lovens trio, and the group was never a trio-plus-one. One of the most striking aspects of this music, in fact, remains its unity of purpose; a sense of four musicians operating as a single unit as they shape the music over time, sculpting and massaging its forms as they go. First thing's first as Schlippenbach uses the inside of the piano to ricochet chordal blocks against the high-pitch intoning of Kowald working the highest register of his bass. Overtones rain down and Parker's soprano discreetly shadows the static crackle of harmonic interference, come-hither whistles that morph into sustained guttural roars, capped by Schlippenbach's relentlessly craggy solo. During the second piece the high-energy plateaus into lullaby pizzicatos on the bass which head towards a head-spinning slipstream of super-sonic high gargles, and where the bass ends and Parker's soprano begins is anybody's guess. This is a short album – a dazzling amount of compressed detail packed into under forty minutes, with Parker and Kowald's sky-scraping explorations grounded by the punky clatter of Lovens' drums and Schlippenbach's potholed lines.