David Torn's “Prezens” is a collision of the organic and the synthetic, of technology and physicality. His first recording for ECM since the watershed “Cloud About Mercury” of 20 years ago, it features the guitarist, producer and film composer with three of New York City's more fearless improvising musicians -- alto saxophonist Tim Berne, keyboardist Craig Taborn and drummer Tom Rainey, long-time cohorts of each other. In early spring 2005, they gathered in a studio in the Hudson River Valley to record a dozen hours of collective improvisation, drawing on several years of experience playing live together in Manhattan and Brooklyn clubs, as well as at festivals in Canada and Europe. Yet “Prezens” is no documentary record, with Torn having "magicked" the tapes -- remixing, reshaping, recomposing the music after its performance to create discrete collages of power and beauty, by turns ambient and volatile. Much as a work of fiction can sometimes reveal more about an event than mere journalistic reportage, “Prezens” offers another point of view on the facts of the band in the room.