One of downtown NYC’s great, unsung guitar heroes, Chris Cochrane has a long-standing record of work in bands such as early Knitting Factory-era prog/post-rock outfits No Safety (with Zeena Parkins) and George Cartwright’s Curlew, the proto-queercore Suck Pretty, and collaborations with everyone from Fred Frith, Mark Ribot, Derek Bailey, and Ikue Mori to T Bone Burnett and Richard Buckner. His raw, angular guitar style embraces a gamut of tender, bluesy lyricism and harsh noise.

Tonight he performs music from his new CD on John Zorn’s Tzadik label. Originally composed for a 1985 collaborative dance/theater work with choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones and writer Dennis Cooper, THEM is an edgy, unflinching look at the dynamics of gay male relationships and loss in the midst of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Ahead of its time twenty-five years ago, the piece has recently been revived to great critical acclaim, winning awards and touring widely. Cochrane’s music provides a perfect sonic metaphor for the entangled struggle of bodies, loss, and innocence in this disturbing yet poetic tour de force. (Read an interview here.)

Climax Golden Twins is the inscrutable and ever-morphing sonic beast animated by Rob Millis and Wall of Sound proprietor Jeffrey Taylor. Together, individually and with others, they push the definition of a “band” to its limits, making live movie soundtracks, gallery installations, weird ethnographic films, and deeply immersing themselves in the dusty, crackling grooves of old 78s. Willfully defiant of accepted genre boundaries, their extensive catalog of recordings in various formats includes permutations of mutant rock, ungodly noise, and minimal ambient drone. Among many other things.