Pitchfork

Playing the theremin for the first time can be a revelatory experience for guitar players-- accustomed to pulling music out of an instrument, you're suddenly confronted with one where you push it back in. Personal pride gives way to humility at the sovereignty of sound. The improvisational electro troupe Excepter makes sound art in the latter mold. After all, if you want to get abstract, writing a song is a pointless exercise, like carving an apple into the shape of a smaller apple. Raw sound naturally resolves into patterns that Excepter, using strands of synthesizer, percussion, and sampled electronics, repeatedly try and fail to disrupt. Rubble still describes a system, and in the absence of intent, a system creates its own meaning.

So Excepter's stance is classically formalist-- the message subsides beneath the medium, then reemerges profoundly changed. We're used to their recordings working one idea through copious face-melting permutations. On KA, they explored coruscating Krautrock, while Throne was all doomy incantation. Self-Destruction and Sunbomber were static and sparse, like grotesquely deformed parodies of house music. But on Alternation, Excepter is flirting with coherent variation and bona fide songs.

While cutting a swath through a variety of electronic genres, Excepter still fucks with dance music-- "Lypscnm E6! X" festoons a disorderly tinkle of percussion with Soulwax-precise blips as warbling synths bend in paper-clip formations and Suicide's slow throb pushes along toneless vocals. But atypically, the strands almost fit together, describing a clean rhythmic thrust rather than a densely involuted spiral. "The 'Rock' Stepper" is broke-down acid house, but there's only low-level tension. There's no release, no blissed-out shortcuts to derangement, just patient mutation, a long slow slide toward an edge that recedes as it's approached. "He walks like his legs are broken," goes one of two lyrics on the album that might not be red herrings (more on the other soon)-- Excepter locomotes, but only with profound difficulty.

On the brutally spare "The Ladder", distant dino percussion, an off-time bleat, mumbled vocals, and a gyroscopic pulse allude to the most rudimentary, gestural deep house imaginable. "Ice Cream Van" builds a sort of monstrous synth-pop from twiddly snake-charming electro and rigid percussion, with vocals about the existential plight of an ice cream man in the winter that incomprehensibly segue into "Do Your Ears Hang Low?". "Back Me Up" alludes to early, electro-influenced hip-hop, while "Op Pop" has roughly the same relationship to dub that a cave painting does to a bison. And "(The Pipes)" is "house" music in the most literal sense-- the clank of actual plumbing mingles with a high synthetic whine.

The glistering nighttime glide "If I Were You" contains the second instructive lyric-- "I'd like to introduce our machines to you, but I forgot their names/ I'd like to shake hands with each and every one of you, but I'm onstage." Unlike many electro-noise acts, Excepter aren't gear fetishists. Their machines are a means to an end, creating noises that matter less for their specific qualities than their infinitude. And the creators themselves never really occur in these gusty, revenant-smeared corridors. While Alternation is their closest brush with deliberate order, it retains the reverent slippage and self-effacement of their previous work. They still seem unconcerned with the ratification of their existence through art-- it's more than enough to be obliquely perceived, and to leave a residue of the phenomenon behind.