Cevin Key, or cEVIN key, as the caps-lock-impaired refer to him, has been working in that strange liminal area known as "industrial music" for over 15 years now. As a founding member of Skinny Puppy, a principal member of Doubting Thomas and the Tear Garden, and a collaborator with (or producer for) just about every other member of the industrial scene, Key has left his fingerprints-- no doubt he'd prefer hoofprints or clawmarks-- all over the place. So few people would be more qualified than he to assemble a disc like Wild Planet, a genre sampler featuring unreleased songs and remixes by some of the best acts in experimental electronic music.

Well, sort of. Perusing the list of credits is enough to raise suspicion: Key wrote, played on or remixed at least half of Wild Planet's 14 selections, which seems enough to call into question his motivations for choosing these particular songs. That line between wide-ranging compilation and self-serving pet project sure is thin. But there's a bigger problem with Wild Planet-- the way it highlights a certain inadequate phrase within the rock-n-roll lexicon. Namely experimental electronic music.

Just what is experimental electronic music? An experiment, in my understanding, is a trial or test designed to be carried out under controlled conditions with the aim of proving or disproving a hypothesis. For example, one might hypothesize that, immediately following the Big Bang, the universe might have been filled with some mysterious substance called quark-gluon plasma. One might also subsequently design a test involving big gold atoms and a supercollider with the intent of proving that such a substance could exist. That would be an experiment, and in conducting it, you might consider yourself an experimental electronic scientist.

But what are these experimental electronic musicians hypothesizing? From the bulk of Wild Planet, I surmise that their hypotheses run along the lines of "Nobody out there would notice if I used this beat again," or, "Synthesized pipe organs could still be spooky," or, "It may be possible to create a dark, brooding synth song using only my keyboard's white keys." Too bad these experiments are so rarely successful.

Of course, part of the blame for these failed experiments may just be historical revisionism. Now that Trent Reznor has besmirched industrial music's name by turning it into the official theme music of hormone-addled, suburban, troglodytic 13-year olds the world over, it's become a bit harder to take any of it seriously. But leaving aside the inhospitable climate, most of Wild Planet seems doomed to fail on its own merits. From the orchestra hit-laden darkwave of Aduck to PlatEAU's featureless ambience to Dead Voices on Air's sophomoric goth spoken word, there's just not that much to like here. Even the contribution of Download, the project that saw Key shed some adolescent angst and explode the boundaries of the rather limiting genre he helped pioneer, falls flat on its Pigface.

Not surprisingly, the disc's two keepers come from Edward Ka-Spel, who always somehow manages to perform slow, mopey tightrope walks far above the heads of his contemporaries. Key's remix of the Tear Garden's "Things That Go Bump in the Night" is an excellent example of the way that band fused dancier beats with Ka-Spel's psychedelic sensibilities. The Legendary Pink Dots' "Fate's Faithful Punchline" succeeds on a strength essentially unknown to the other bands here: songwriting.

But what's unfortunate is that, even with the vast industrial resources available to him, Key put together such a lackluster compilation-- especially since the aim seems to be to provide a quick history lesson for the uninitiated. For those who desire such a thing, something out of the Soleilmoon catalog may be a better bet.

-Zach Hooker