When I was a junior in high school, our crazed libertarian English teacher forced us to read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. I was pretty impressionable at the time and consider myself lucky not to have sustained permanent psychic damage-- or worse, become a practicing Objectivist, a cult with which I briefly flirted in a desperate bid for attention. But Objectivism, what with its inherent mistrust of collaboration and eclecticism, makes for boring music.

Syncretism is where it's at, and Bathing Music is deliciously dialectic. Any band which manages to recall Tom Waits, the Sea and Cake, Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill, Henryk Gorecki, Elliot Sharp, Red House Painters, Camper van Beethoven, Naked City, Medicine, Bauhaus, Ornette Coleman, Rachel's, Miranda Sex Garden, and the UCLA Bruin Marching Band over the span of 42 minutes is worthy of note. And bands that can take a mix like that and make it seem inevitable is formidable, indeed.

Rollerball purportedly use more organic instruments than electronic and record as much live as possible, with a minimum of overdubs and a maximum of scrambling around the studio, playing as many instruments as are within reach. Not that you'd know one way or the other from Bathing Music, which blends the band's organic and electronic approaches so seamlessly that the whole seems to have popped spontaneously, quark-like, from the ether. Loops, tape cut-ups, brown noise and various digified rumblings collide with horns, piano and other real-life instruments in a secret plot to overthrow your surroundings.

Roughly half of the album is instrumental, and what vocals Rollerball have included are full-fledged members of the cadre, not your allies. The record works slowly to perfect its fiendish plan; the result is a (mostly) bloodless coup that leaves everything around you subtly changed.

While Bathing Music is less noisy than Rollerball's previous release, the Einäugige Kirsche EP, it's not necessarily more accessible. It doesn't let up for a second, and there are enough sudden switches and bursts of noise to make it seem as though it was produced by a crazed experimentalist like Warn Defever. Certain bits seem downright danceable if you're not paying attention, but closer listening reveals a seething undercurrent of static, scary sampled voices, and generally creepy noise. Still, the album's barren psychological landscape boasts a surprisingly diverse range of geological features, from scratched-up slowburns to piano-based ballads. This is eclecticism at its riot-inducing best, and Ayn Rand would be very, very scared of it.

Road Cone is swiftly becoming the micro-label to watch. Their commitment to experimental music of many varieties is truly exciting, and their IPR-esque approach to packaging and pricing bespeaks a real love of the music they release. Bathing Music is the latest jewel in their crown, but no doubt there will be more and better in the future.

-Zach Hooker