Excepter's recently released Tank Tapes came with a clause: "This is not practice. This is training." Because practice is what bands do to stop sucking, and if Excepter stopped sucking in the vernacular sense, they'd also stop being interesting. Excepter have made an art out of never actually playing a song, and in the interim, sort of turning around and facing the possibility of a song, sniffing it, chewing it, and throwing up on it. Practice implies a goal, and if Excepter has one, it's to never let sound capitulate into coherent music.
So, training. Training takes place in a vacuum-- it's for athletes or soldiers whose terrain hasn't been fully revealed. Excepter's sterling history of reluctance and success in not playing a single pleasant note is captured, in jumbled time-lapse phonography, on Streams, a two-disc set distilling 30-odd hours of 36 podcasts the band recorded and released for free between 2003 and 2006.
Give the title room to breathe and it's a pun on at least three levels-- streaming audio, water's perpetual motion, and Excepter's own stream of consciousness. And yet, Streams reveals an evolution of impetus: Excepter's soft, queasy abstractions have drifted further from the model of electro-acoustic improv set forth by tribes like the No-Neck Blues Band (who used to count Excepter's John Fell Ryan as a member) to something more rhythm-based, influenced by reggae's casual bounce and a corrosive, amateurish take on dub. 2005's Self Destruction was even pitched as a "house record," which it wasn't, unless dancing requires a concussion. The devastation Excepter has wrought is not only in being either the laziest and most intense band in America, or the most enchanting and most repulsive, but in transposing the noncommittal stoner gunk of drone and head music into something we're supposed to move to. As mouthpiece, Ryan has coalesced: Where he once moaned at nothing in particular, he's managed to forge a hybrid of Jamaican toaster, Jim Morrison, and a homeless man. And make it a comedy routine. Sort of.
But Streams, curated by superfan Robert Girardin (a task more trying than listening to Excepter or probably even being in Excepter), is only one person's perspective on the band's powers. The streams are still being consistently released; between those and last year's excellent Alternation, perspective travelers have better holes to fall in. Einstein said that "the only reason for time is so everything doesn't happen at once," and I'm pretty sure he was anticipating Streams: for some bands, a compilation can be a gleaming sum; with Excepter, it feels better-- worse, sicker, more disorienting, in this case-- to be mired in the bog, crawling to no certain light, training for the void.
