Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid - Speaking another language. (print version)

It's a little bit jazz, it's a little bit folk, it's a little bit electronica, let's face it, it's a little bit of everything. The Exchange Sessions came blaring into the music world's consciousness with an unpracticed flurry of beats and organic bleeps, and now its successor, Tongues, is taking it further. 'Unpracticed!' I hear muso's cry – that's right, all these tracks were composed, performed, and recorded in one take with no prior discussion - in a stream of unedited musical consciousness and unspoken co-ordination. It's unfathomable for most musicians to deliver straight from the head and fly blind in the ultimate jam session, but Kieran, also known for his involvement with electronic agitators Four Tet, began work with Steve in 2005 (a man so cool he signs off his conversations with "stay in the rhythm"), to bring together their equally eclectic tastes for this prolific venture.

Kieran, who pre-prepares melodic sounds - the only regimental degree to their music - admits it can sound a bit 'extreme' at moments, but it's interesting that an album that makes use of live percussion, reeds, saxophone and vibraphone could be thrown into a category usually reserved for the likes of death metal and gabba. How does not rehearsing and playing straight from the head affect the work they produce, and are mistakes simply an organic consequence of the style? "We don't make any plans," Steve confirms. "No musical discussions, no premeditations or anything like that. We just both listen to different things individually and when we come together, we put that in the mix and then totally something new is born, y'know. And that's what keeps it fresh every moment, that we haven't pre-planned everything. We let the music play us - we aren't playing the music."

Kieran's urge to break down barriers and blow people's minds hinges on a need to bring freedom back to music and live concerts in particular: "I felt that it's become so normal now for people to try and recreate their albums in a live setting, and I find that quite boring," he says. "I can listen to the band at home, when I see a band live I want to see them push themselves, and see where they're at musically at that point, what their current ideas are. I think you get that quite a lot with DJs; you can go into a club and hear what that person is trying to do at that moment, the music is very of the moment."

The Exchange Sessions attracted a mixed bag of reviews – some dismissed it as just noise, while others said it was unparalleled imagination. They've had positive reviews of Tongues so far, but as Steve says: "The record's a little distance away from what we do in person", so you can't be sure to hear what you heard on the album when it makes the transition to the stage. They are currently on a ten-date UK tour, hitting Edinburgh on 25 March. Steve enthuses with an endearing tobacco-deepened laugh about looking forward to the gig and the "New York flavour" of the UK, telling fans to get ready. It might be of interest at this stage, if you didn't already know, that Steve Reid is a sprightly music-mad teenager – in a 63 year old jazz/motown legend's body. He has an auspicious background in music, from playing with Martha and The Vandellas, Miles Davis, to James Brown and Fela Kuti, and three years learning traditional drumming in West Africa.

But where does Tongues take up from the Exchange Sessions? Is it a clear-cut break from the past, or have sounds and ideas transferred? "It's a continuation to show the people what we got, y'know. There's no end to it, this is just another road we are going down – the same avenue we're on, and that's the road of improvisation," says Steve. Kieran feels that the Exchange Sessions were about capturing "the musical meeting" of people from different sorts of worlds, resulting in lengthy tracks, something they wanted to change in Tongues. Steve was into the idea of making more concise tracks of four-five minutes, and Kieran wanted to do something different: "I started working on the melodic stuff I wanted to bring into the records. I think had a different mentality [approaching this record] as well. When I first started working with Steve, I was thinking more in terms of jazz music a lot more, because that was the sort of world he was coming from… I wanted to find a much more bizarre assortment of sounds to work with. That's how we suddenly had things like music boxes, harp samples, and techno types of sounds coming in."

Classification methods and 'pigeon-holing' become a fairly moot point in reviewing and discussion of Tongues – it's a blend of modern electronic, jazz percussion, dance, and a tinge of the experimental. Dissection merely hinders any progress in trying to 'understand' the music - you either 'get' it or don't. The beats are just consistent enough to nail it down, but any ideas of how each genre should sound are blown away when it is played as one. Steve suggests that it could be coined as nu-jazz, going through another re-birth, which has yet to be defined. There's a more accessible edge to the album, and the melodic builds sound crafted and scored, rather than random and "intensely experimental." It may not be a cash-rich venture or bounding down the charts to number one, but that's not particularly important to two men who are so focussed on the music. And you're just as likely to see the duo booked for d&b/techno clubs in the same month as a jazz festival.

Is Tongues "pioneering a mental health programme", writing a planetary-wide prescription for happiness? Steve believes it is both: "In my strange mind, I think the planet would have been destroyed if it wasn't for the music over these years. There's no blood on the music, that's all I got to say about that."