On the album, Rutherford is joined by computer musicians Robert Jarvis and Lawrence Casserley.

His signature tone provides the backbone of the whole album, Casserley and Jarvis explode, fragment and refract the trombone's input, and these digitalized ghost images trigger from Rutherford a kind of interaction that is strikingly different from his behavior with acoustic instrumentalists... Iskra3 may remain an oddity in Rutherford's discography, but it is more than a simple concession to the electro-acoustic improv trend of the mid-'00s.

"[1] The authors of The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings awarded the album a full 4 stars, calling it "a new stage in Rutherford's remarkable career."

They commented: "These are immensely powerful pieces, still dominated by Rutherford's trombone-playing, but now in the context of a highly responsive background that gives the music mass and density as well as line and presence.

"[5] AAJ's Andrey Henkin suggested that, in relation to Neuph (1978), Iskra³ is "a different beast as Rutherford has a more traditional function... but utilizes a modern innovation—computer processing—to update what an acoustic instrument, albeit one played in expert hands, can accomplish when its musical counterpart is a machine, though one manipulated by its own duo of improvisors.