Kudu

Trumpeter Jaimie Branch and drummer Jason Nazarny played together in a number of bands dating back to their shared time studying at the New England Conservatory of Music, but their first autonomous superduo effort as Anteloper reveals their rapport to be a particularly strange one. The characteristic ebullient intensity of Branch’s playing and Nazarny’s mutably taut drumming are augmented by a collection of synthesizers that give everything a sort of queasily claustrophobic, all-enveloping electronic throb, like a video arcade where the games are all competing to be the noisiest. If that throws listeners off, good — the result is an exercise in sleight-of-sound that delivers frequent emotional and tonal curveballs, peaking in the staggering collapse-build-destroy dynamics of “Ohoneotree Suite.”