Pitchfork

The current update on Michael Lenzi's Resplendent homepage isn't so much a diatribe as a lament. After ten years making music, first in Number One Cup, later in Chicago's brilliant, aggressively experimental Fire Show, and now on his own as Resplendent, he writes that he's grown tired of playing the game of promotion and jumping through the music industry's hoops, and as a result, his series of numbered, tin-encased EPs isn't selling at all. He hits on a sad truism of really any line of business: It's almost impossible to succeed if you don't play the game at least a little. But in a sense, you could say he's never really played the game the way it's supposed to be played; at every stage of his career, Lenzi has made or been a part of making music that broached no compromises with anyone.

It doesn't look like he's ready to start changing his ways now, either, as all three of his solo EPs have steadfastly walked unbeaten paths away from his older work, all the while sharing with his past a seeming addiction to change and exploration. While his first EP, last summer's In a Wilderness, struck in a sort of lo-fi hip-hop direction with detours into dark-forest IDM and demon-approved lullabies (okay, it was all over the place) with appropriately mixed results, the two that have followed it, Wings Beneath the Sills and Casket City Wolves, are minor masterworks of sometimes breathtaking beauty and startling creativity. Whereas In a Wilderness seemed to strive for invention, its counterparts are effortlessly new sounding, almost inevitable in their off-handed innovation.

Wings Beneath the Sills opens with an unsettling combination of steel drums and flute, which comprise nearly the entire arrangement of "Resolution Time", apart from Lenzi's low-key vocal. Oddly, the song's chord structures and melody (partially nicked from The Clash, but only just) lend it an old-school R&B feel-- it's consonant, eerie, familiar, and alien all at once. The disc is filled with fractured percussion: "Luminescent Exultant Chariot" is constituted entirely by sputtering drum cutups, minimal, rounded synth tones and Lenzi's solemn sing/speak. Those rounded synths help shape the static core of "Nape of Neck Hints", giving Lenzi's plaintive vocals (played backward for one verse) something to cling to and helping to create the prettiest squall of noise I've ever heard, while "Sleeptalking in the Natatorium" raises the hair on your neck with its grotesquely gorgeous wash of sound-- it's pastoral and yet mechanical, like Boards of Canada with razor edges.

Casket City Wolves builds on the textural blueprint of Wings, with greater rhythmic variety and an ear toward more traditional songcraft. "Judas Priest Cul de Sac" is nudged along by a keyboard bassline and junk percussion courtesy of Califone's Ben Massarella and Chicago session man Joe Adamik, while Lenzi's vocal melody casts hooks across it all-- it's a pop song, basically, but the jittery texture and oddball arrangement turn it completely on its head. "Rise the Sun (On Cassette Mountain)" swings from sung/spoke verses to catchy choruses complete with descending, sing-songy bass countermelodies that are perversely sunny next to Lenzi pleading "don't take your shit out on me."

According to his site, Lenzi is now working on a Resplendent full-length, and the mind reels trying to imagine what he's got cooking up in the studio. The signature sound he's forged has almost limitless potential to expand and incorporate essentially whatever threads might be hanging nearby, and his minimalist approach is devastating almost by default. As the closing tones of "Dreamer's Dub" evaporate into the ether to end Casket City Wolves, it intentionally leaves you hanging, wanting more. Whatever follows is almost sure to be amazing.