Dense with detail and wide in scope, the album has many hallmarks of masterful free improv, especially Ranaldo and Licht's textured, mountain-climbing guitars and Hooker's torrential drumming. But it's also strangely cinematic, like a fragmented dream - objectively random yet surreally logical - due to Olive and Marclay's spiky concrete sounds, which add bursts of dislocated narrative. Each track on Text of Light is an uncut excerpt from a show, but other releases feature various recordings edited together. "When we first decided to release stuff, we were so tied to the music existing alongside these films that it took us a while to figure out how to approach the music alone," explains Ranaldo. "Since then we've gone back into the recordings and combined different moments." Adds Licht, "In a way, we had to go through the process of selecting extended excerpts that we felt were strong enough to stand on their own first. So now we can go back and find individual things and mix them together."
