Post-rock is an easy genre to deride. I can't count the number of times that, while waiting in line at the pharmacy counter for my weekly hand-out of war-zone-strength Senokot tablets, I've heard one glib, over-medicated oik observe to another: "Tortoise make muzak for grad students." It's especially easy to pick on Tortoise-- they're the fortunate ones signed to Warp Records. They're also the ones whose Standards album was discussed more for its Jasper Johns cover's relation to the macerated U.S. 2000 election than for the music it contained.

The resentment that many express towards post-rock seems generated by anxiety. The genre is a progressive form and is therefore on a journey into territories previously marked out for other styles or artforms to explore. Post-rock is a transgressive interloper, and it refuses to conform to the norms expected by the majority of the listening public. Moving away from the safe confines of pop, singer/songwriter misery-confessionals, and meat-head bar-band blues, post-rock runs the risk of falling flat on its geekily spectacled bonce. But that's the trade-off for invigorating experimentation, and for injecting more developed material into the pop genome.

Adam Pierce's Mice Parade project isn't as vilified as John McEntire's band. Listening to Collaborations, you're lulled rather than preached to, and that makes a huge public relations difference. Far from the fussy world beat obscurantisms of 1999's Ramda, Collaborations takes tracks similar to the dub-wise, abstract elegance of that's album "Logic" and rewires them for hazy, post-club comedowns and slow-burning discussions of Andreas Gursky's representations of trading room floors.

Pierce is doubtlessly enamored of Steve Reich's Music for Mallet Instruments, as Ramda more than just name-checked that Reich piece; its "Headphoneland in the School of Old" swindled us into believing that a marimba-ing Reich could have joined Elizabeth Frazer, Horace Andy, or Shara Nelson to turn out a masterpiece with Massive Attack.

For Collaborations, Mice Parade has called in Doug Scharin and Curtis Harvey from Him, Reich disciple and glitch-fiend Nobukazu Takemura, and some nervy bloke called Jim O'Rourke. Over chips and dips, the collaborators tossed a few ideas back and forth, sank some local brew and picked up their Biafran kneedrums, resonating fjord flutes, and Mongolian monochords, and got their moderately MoMA freak on.

Collaborations begins with "The Fall from Andalucia," a pastoral take on Pluramon's motorik aesthetic: Andrés Segovia-like guitar flourishes slip swiftly into aleatorical wind chimes, then into curlew calls bonded air-tight by Jaki Leibezeit-y polyrhythms, marimbas and tabla plashes. Emerging from the closing dissonance of the first track, "Rela Circle" calmly echoes with a lightly reverbed piano and another outing for the quintessential, tentatively-probing post-rock bass figure. Pierce allows a tinny beatbox to oppress muffled congas as a Pullman-style guitar takes over tentative probing duties from the bass.

In the first of its three forms, "Mystery Brethen Vironment" is a lullaby in the style of Laurie Anderson's "O Superman." Hypnotic keyboard lines cascade over Aki Tsuyuko's trickling la-la-la's. Pierce breaks up the airy reverie with a knuckle-head grunge guitar hammer. Though vocalist Tsuyuko does her best to turn the track into an outtake from Lush's Scar sessions, it's a hope against hope. The assault is just overpowering when it could have taken us to territory unheard since Gil Norton's production of Pale Saints' The Comforts of Madness.

Which is exactly what Jim O'Rourke does for his remix of the track. And how splendid it sounds. The shoegazing bedrock is dappled with more tinny beatbox dribbles; backwards acoustic guitar figures cartwheel in glee. O'Rourke processes Tsuyuko's vocals into iridescent splinters and scatters them about with devil-may-care disregard.

Nobukazu Takemura dons his Child's Play guise for the final reworking of "Mystery Brethen Vironment." From a gorge of noise similar to Wire guitarist Bruce Gilbert's version of Can's "TV Spot," Tsuyuko's vocals emerge no longer splintered-- instead, they're stretched into immensely distended ribbons of sound. Takemura ensures that he'll long be burdened with the title "the Phil Spector of Glitch" with a rapidly adapting edifice of micro-blips that loom over the conclusion of this rewarding record.

Though Collaborations will not discourage Wire journalists from hallucinating political statements in the blankly apolitical post-rock genre, it will encourage those wary of such self-consciously aloof stances to dally awhile with this often anxious and ambivalent style.

-Paul Cooper