Chaos theory regards systems, and the idea that any simple one you can think of-- say, the world, or a rock band-- will generate irregular behavior born from decidedly "regular" conditions. Textbooks sometimes talk about chaos in terms of fluctuating animal populations, unpredictable weather patterns and "strange attractors", but it's everywhere, all the time. And paradoxically, there's order in it. If you put a thousand people on a deserted island, they'll turn into a society. It might seem hard to predict what they'd do for more than a very short period at a time, but if you graph their behavior, they start to look pretty orderly. Computer programs help diagram elaborate formations of tiny spirals that form massive, spiraled fractals to describe, say, the economic tendencies of your new, island society. Chaos is an attractive idea, not just because it often seems to match with daily life experiences intuitively well, but also because it feels like something nature has been trying to tell us all along.
For all their unpredictable behaviors, Brooklyn's Excepter has individual parts that are easy enough to see. John Fell Ryan (ex-No Neck Blues Band), Dan Hougland, Macrae Semans, Caitlin Cook, and Calder Martin are-- along with groups like Wolf Eyes, Black Dice, Gang Gang Dance, and Sightings-- the new sound of chaos. They share musical similarities to This Heat, Can, and Faust, in as much as most bands playing "fractal noise" (what I would call Excepter's sound; "fractal" representing the idea that ordered patterns arise from disorder) are similar to them. However, that's not the same thing as saying those bands necessarily influenced Excepter. Rather, they are all in the continuum of musicians exploring/exploiting chaos in rock.
So, yeah. Sounds kind of complicated (or just convoluted), right? It's not, really. From the seemingly limited array of possibilities that should come out of five people playing "progs", sampler, synth, and percussion, comes a bizarre artifice, albeit with a beautiful intrinsic logic. Excepter are "important" to me for the same reasons I believe they'd be important for anyone into the idea that music can represent culture, in the most general way-- so general, in fact, that it's hard to see unless you step back to look at the patterns. None of this is to say Excepter are trying to be chaotic or noisy; rather, their kind of organization is born from kernels of sound allowed to branch out into (near) infinity, restricted by nothing more than its own feedback-- much like the chaotic behavior of economies or weather.
Fusetron's CD issue of KA (originally on vinyl in 2003) includes Excepter's incredible 2004 Vacation EP. It makes a very convincing case that the superficially, peripherally related worlds of electro-acoustic improvisation, IDM, psychedelic rock, and minimalism can not only be joined, but done so in a fashion both natural and ingenious. "Vacation" and "Forget Me" are particularly so, and comprise some of the most fascinating music I've heard this year. Over a simple, persistent drum-machine pulse, disembodied voices, both male and female reverberate through clouds of synth and echoed timbales. The tonality is decidedly major, but with sharp minor-7ths straight out of Can's "Quantum Physics" from Soon Over Babaluma. In fact, if you can imagine that piece slowed down by half, but twice as dense, you're getting close to "Vacation". It's impenetrable in the best sense.
The rest of KA is less attractive but hardly less interesting. "Shattered Skull" features more ghostly voices, but replaces rhythmic pulse with the ebb and flow of a two-note loop and shaken percussion, sounding like blades of dry grass tied together. "See Your Son" is similarly mysterious but spookier, eventually converging on a chorus of voices in no particular harmony except during random, brief consonant asides. "Be Beyond Me" brings the drum machine back, though the feel of the track is turbulent where "Vacation" had been sublime. The track fades out in a drone, attaching a subtle synth pattern to the bass drum pulse in a way thousands of minimal techno tracks have, but never approaching watercolor bliss; rather, it's an imperfect model of repetition and mood. The one-minute "Breast of the Wave Offering" obscures the pulse by muffling the entire production and drenching it with bass drone and what sounds like homemade electronic squeaks. It segues into the wild "The Fire and the Wood", behaving like the unhinged cousin of Black Dice's Creature Comforts, digital animal kingdom and all. The untidy patterns are everywhere and chaos abounds.
