Trust Their Intuition

YOU WILL NEVER hum the tune of an Erstwhile Records release. You will never tap your fingers to an Erstwhile release. (Unless you have extra digits or octopus arms.) You will never get laid to an Erstwhile release. (Unless you're into those freaky art-school students who make their own clothes.) And you will never march down the aisle, dance at your cousin's bar mitzvah, or wait for your dentist appointment to an Erstwhile release. (Unless your dentist is Derek Bailey.)

For the last four years, New Yorker Jon Abbey has built Erstwhile into the little engine that could of electro-acoustic improv. (Say what? Don't ask me, I flunked out of art school. Basically, non-predetermined music made with electric and/or acoustic instruments.) In a field dominated by fly-by-night operations largely devoted to the doings of their owners, Erstwhile marries a solid design aesthetic and solid marketing (frowned on by the dour dons of free improv) with Abbey's insistence on throwing unfamiliar elementsnamely, the playerstogether.

While no improv can be considered "flawless" (just ask Robin Williams), Erstwhile's batting average is disturbingly high. This is largely because Abbey's players are virtuosos. (And anyone who tries to tell you that free improv denies virtuosity has never had to sit through a "wacky" noise performance at their local coffee shop.) Erstwhile's bedrock is 60-something guitarist Keith Rowe, of veteran British improv troupe AMM. AMM is all over the Erstwhile aesthetic: almost fragile technique contrasted with unpredictable noise; plunges into the unknown and intuitive interplay; chance meetings on operating tables; denatured sound. You don't have to call it music if the term scares you. (Just ask John Cage.) But if you're ready to let go of your hang-ups about, like, melody and stuff, here are four Erstwhile records worth your time and cash.

Cosmos is a duo of Sachiko M, who plays a sampler with no samples in it (kooky!), and Ami Yoshida, who plays her voice (kookier than you think). Tears combines Sachiko's pure, piercing sine wave modulations and Yoshida's sound-as-sound utterances. Yoshida often works by doing little more than passing air over her vocal chords, a mesmerizing stream of twitters, grunts, coos. In the few photos I've seen of her, she looks almost terrifyingly focused, possessed, like someone who's spent too long trying to imitate the variety of birdsong. The urge is to play this loud, but live, the duo hovers on the edge of silence, so adjust your system, biologic and otherwise, accordingly.

Also on the threshold of audibilityno coincidenceis Weather Sky, by the duo of Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura, who plays a mixing board. (Sachiko and Nakamura belong to the same "onkyo" school of extreme sonic reduction.) Nakamura's feedback-ridden mixer is seemingly static, but crawling with microscopic life forms. Rowe's interventions on tabletop guitar (more than any player, Rowe strips his instrument of its usual referents) are scalpel precise, blending almost imperceptibly. It's music to swim around in, but repeated plays at high volume will make your ear doctor rich.

Erstwhile's most commercial release to date is probably glitchy beachcomber Fennesz's collaboration with neo-chamber ensemble Polwechsel, whose Wrapped Islands (evoking conceptual art nutjob Christo, who trussed up the Reichstag like leftover Christmas ham) is like name, like nature. Everything remains suitably gauzelike and indistinct, but the overall mood is nearly tropical compared with Weather Sky's arid hermeticism. Fennesz's love of cycling guitar twang and the glitch as an update of Jesus & Mary Chain-style distorto-bliss has made him the tour guide between indie guitar-noise and the scary hinterlands of free improv.

But all three pale compared to Erstwhile's latest release, Rowe and John Tilbury's Duos for Doris. Members of AMM since 1981, the two have reached scary, Outer Limits levels of musical telepathy here. Recorded just days after the death of Tilbury's mother (hence the title), it is music with the deftness of touch of Japanese calligraphy. Tilbury's notesoften only one or two in a minute or 10rise to the surface, popping like bubbles. Rowe's guitar is an environment: pregnant hums, anticipatory buzzes, sudden jolts along the skin, muttering, incomprehensible insect language. Nothing sounds like strings. Rowe & Tilbury turn the notion of improv as dry and academic on its head here. Duo's for Doris carries an almost unbearable sense of incommunicable longing; it floods the brain with tangled emotion.

As a pop guy with pretensions to profundity, I find this hearteningit means this stuff is "working." While I appreciate the tenacity with which the improv vanguard attacks the commonly held notions of musicality (like, punk rock, dude), mostly it comes off to these ears as larded with pointless chittering and leftover free jazz baggage. Erstwhile and fellow travelers (like guitarist Taku Sugimoto, who plays almost as many notes as minutes in his sets) make immersive music, even as it absolutely refuses any New Age positioning. Anyone who's ever soaked up the heroin house of the Chain Reaction label will find, with a slight tweaking of ears, endless vistas of alien beauty here.

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