Performing at the Notown Sound Festival, Atlanta, Georgia, April 2, 2005... a barrage of sound, yet consisting of parts relatively-easily discernable... Excepter is to the electronic music of the present-day as the Velvet Underground were to teeny-bopper Rock in 1966. How far we have come in such a short time... I remember Ian Penman, in reviewing Mille Plateaux's Modulations and Transformations 4 compilation for the Wire, ridiculing the Brit-pop of Blur and Suede in comparison, and being angry at such a curt dismissal of music I love even as I was intrigued by such a strong advocacy for another kind of music I was just starting to appreciate. Indeed, the stark, dry digital sounds of Experimental Electronica did seem liberatory. As we listened to Aphex Twin's Richard D. James Album, a friend of mine and I lamented the sweet synth-keyboard melodies getting in the way of the splintered, brittle beats. We greeted the harsh landscape of the computer-world with a warmth it lacked. These new sounds - the extraordinary timbre of digital sound when not forced to constrict itself in imitation of acoustic instruments - provoked thoughts of renewal, progress over the past, though not toward a better future, just one more at ease with the technology's seemingly uncontrollable historical trajectory. But, in darker times - which means, poorer times - a more critical and inspired approach to machines is more apt to make music which reflects and impels the culture enveloping it.

Hearken this moan: the low, drawn-out voice which is the central actor in Ka's first track, "Sheltered Skull," accompanied by a simple, two-part bass drone - the track's persistent background - as well as shaker-percussions and another voice - female, scattered at first, before becoming a running commentary upon the moan (which at one point becomes a scream, or is that still another voice? and of what relation are the other voices appearing in fragments here and there?)... could there be a more evocative and revealing introduction to an album, itself the band's debut other than the hard-to-find CD-R EP Ag? It is unfathomable in many ways - the movement of the voice itself, the emotions it is conveying; I suppose it is unsure itself, and has simply come unexpected up from the singer's belly, occupying the entire body with the mere act of singing, improvised - really improvised - then treated with electronics, given a sharper relief, as the artist considers what it meant, molds it to fit the idea he now has in his head, after the act. The percussion is amplified and multiplied, the movement of the hands thus made into a grand gesture, like the planting of a seed. Indeed, in the electro-acoustic manipulation of virtually every facet of the track, it becomes the mysterious, magisterial thing it is. Without the space created by all that reverb and echo - the distance thus created between the artist and the listener - the sounds would not command our attention, would not captivate and intrigue like they do.

Nonetheless, the centrality of the voices distinguishes the track, and Excepter's music in general, from the two-dimensional nothingness of much contemporary music. No festishization of electronic sound; instead, the use of tools to satisfy well-honed aesthetic senses. No virtuosity with the instruments either, as the group prefer to discard what are, after all, mere disposable pieces of mass-culture junk, once they feel they have gotten out of them what they need. And, perhaps, what is needed most in these times is such unadulterated moans, yelps, screams, mumbles, nascent words slowly rising from the mind, taking center-stage, in lieu of skilled actors and technicians.

A two-week sojourn to New York, July 2005, and the first performance by the new, quartet version of Excepter awaits, along with two new records, Throne and Self Destruction. The performance: leaner than the entrancing density of sound I had heard at the Atlanta gig noted above; as such, the listener follows along more closely. The rationale behind the change, and its results, will become evident on the 2006 records, Sunbomber and Alternation. Meanwhile, 2005's: Throne is an electronic, psychedelic masterpiece, steadily building over its half-hour length a driving momentum, which nonetheless is weighted down by the slow, stately rhythms of "Jrone (Three)" and "Jrone (Two)" (the first "Jrone" was on Ka); and yet, with "The Heartbeat" and "(The Ass)," it reaches a frenzied climax or two, or three. The looped beat that underlays the "Jrone" tracks, allowing breathing room for both entrancing plateaus and frenzied peaks, is closer to Javanese gamelan or Japanese Gagaku than any sort of electronic music. As with Ka, the electronics-manipulated voices, which are a crucial part of these climaxes, are like barely-formed ghosts of everything that has ever uttered from human mouths. I say, "psychedelic"... remembering that years ago, a friend of mine said that live performances by the group Spiritualized were akin to being on hallucinogenic drugs; that was not what I heard. Maybe I have a less benign view of drugs, but Throne, especially when listened to on headphones, is to me psychedelic music; it is truly disorienting, making one unsure of what his senses are taking in. Perhaps it's best just to say that you should listen to this record loud - really loud. Make sure you notice the different parts. Dwell in them. I hardly ever listen to music loud, but I have difficulty appreciating the record's various parts and its overall effect at low volumes - except on headphones of course.

Self Destruction explores varying strategies of the less-is-more school of thought, even as its soundscapes are as complex and hard to pin down as the longer works of Karlheinz Stockhausen or Pierre Henry or the multi-layered electro-acoustic pop of The Olivia Tremor Control or Animal Collective. "Bad Vibration": while I would not use the word, "bad," there is something intriguingly annoying, or aggravating, or sickening - that is, bad-vibe-like - about the three-part pattern that runs throughout the track's ten minutes. Consisting of a bass tone, a digital click, and - let's guess - a choir electronically muffled until it's as quiet as a hum, sounding machine-like but human-like too. While the middling digital click seems to stay the same - or perhaps one of its three steps is weaker - the to-and-fro between the other two, after its origin (or what this listener decides is its origin, since the pattern sounds like it'll go on forever, that it has its own existence beyond this track, which only realized the pattern's existence well after it had begun) takes two steps up in frequency, and then starts over again. It unexpectedly slows down at one point, when the other parts of the track have dropped out; you're surprised, you think you're imagining it, you have to listen to it a few times to convince yourself it really did that. You're in a non-descript office building, the drones of masses of machines surrounding you; you're going insane (or have taken too many pills); the drones are slowing down, or there are little variations in the patterns you never noticed before. You're going insane.

Then again, listening to the track on the stereo in my living room, doors open to the screened porch, and thus to the massive swell of sounds made by insects - assuming it's not winter - and further out - that is, from the perspective of our senses, as the insects' sound reaches us first - to the sight of trees, great numbers and kinds of trees, "Bad Vibration" makes perfect ambient music. I go out, into the porch, and sit. The bugs buzzing, I look up: a small tree close to the porch has become, in the darkening night, nothing to my eyes but black lines against a deep navy-blue sky. This: the inability of my eyes to see what the tree "really" looks like, is the beginning of everything - art, science, literature, and back again to art. An ideologue among artists could say that we should not worry about our supposed inability to see the tree exactly. This perspective is ultimately true; after all, I cannot confirm that the tree exists, only that some images have formed in my head. But we'll give the scientists their due - they did make the stereo I'm listening to! "Bad Vibration," meanwhile, provides plenty to occupy my ears: from the aforementioned "vibe" with its deep bass tones - which, being electronic, of course are marked by fine, delineating lines so unlike their acoustic counterparts - to the sprightly high frequencies of the synthesizer melodies that grab the listener's attention when they come in; not to mention John Fell Ryan's vocal part, which when it first appears brusquely breaks the general mood of the piece, only to flow into the whole.

Both Self Destruction and Throne make even the best of Experimental Electronica (Pan Sonic, Oval, Fennesz, Alva Noto) seem paltry, too enamored with the pitiful influx of power the artist apparently feels when exposing the listener to the brittle sound of digital electronics, or still too encumbered by past interest in House-Techno. At the same time, Excepter find themselves at a curious intersection of, on one hand, Noise and Industrial musics and, on the other, improvised electro-acoustic music. For, until the revival of the latter in the 1990's [Günter Müller, MIMEO, Japanese "onkyo"] the artists who approached performance the same way Excepter do were with some exceptions (notably, Voice Crack) part of the music-cultures we call Noise and Industrial. That is to say, for concerts they did not aim to re-create recordings, but understood the potential of the event, the happening; and yet, for their records, though they might record live, these artists worked in the studio (or the home "studio") carefully sculpting works - editing and re-editing, montaging and collaging - in a way musicians corded off in the Improvised category would find pointless or, in some cases, ideologically suspect. Not that Industrial-Noise artists or Excepter ignore the potential in live recordings: see Throbbing Gristle's exhaustive documentation of its performances (which we can only hope Excepter equal with their MP3-streams of concerts). While the flow and morphing of Noise and Industrial artists into the less-easily-pigeon-holed pseudo-academic electro-acoustic music of the present day [see: Ralf Wehowsky, John Duncan, Zoviet France] was fairly evident, their similar prescience of the resurgence of improvised electro-acoustic music was something we just did not comprehend until Excepter's music broke down the walls in our memories and made it obvious.