Why would anyone want to listen to noise? One theory is that songs with words and more "musical" kinds of music are meant to convey a certain feeling through an agreed-upon language, while noise music is meant to replicate the sound of consciousness itself. That's how I like to approach albums like Above Buildings. These drones, scrapes and hisses are what happens in my head on a particularly bad day, and there's something reassuring in having it out there, encoded on a 5" aluminum disc, where I can reach it when I want it. Even if the sounds themselves offer little comfort.

Janek Schaefer makes his living as an architect, and his recorded work has a serious conceptual bent. An earlier piece called "Recorded Delivery" consisted of sounds recorded by a mini-cassette as it traveled through the postage system. Live, Schaefer performs with a three-armed turntable with wires connected all screwy, so he gets strange phasing effects coming through the amplifiers. Above Buildings, his first full-length, is, on the surface, more "straight." This is billed as a record of "field recordings" that have been manipulated in the studio and blended with choice textures from Schaefer's three-armed bandit.

I must say, though, I don't ever want to spend a night in the field where these recordings were made. About 70% of Above Buildings is dark, sinister drone music of the most engaging order. It's cinematic, yes, but far too daring for most directors to take a chance on. Schaefer has a fondness for scrapes, brushes, static and friction, not unlike other Central European artists like Oval and Fennesz. Layers of this itchy stuff are piled upon the processed sounds of breathing concrete and single church belltones that last forever.

Initially, the most striking thing about Above Buildings is the brilliant use of dynamics. In order to properly hear the faint but important details, you'll need to turn your stereo's volume knob to an anxiety-producing level. And eventually, this extreme setting will come back to haunt you, as Schaefer's imposing machinery comes crashing down in a noisy heap. You cannot listen to this music and do something that requires concentration.

But what really makes Above Buildings great is the variety of the sounds and artfulness of their arrangement. Though Schaefer's mostly working with drones, scrapes and assorted odd tones, he's capable of making something that strikes me as "happy." The opening track, "Forglen," is what it sounds like inside the mind of someone who's coming up on amphetamines, at the point of euphoria, just before thoughts of bad side effects kick in. (Well, kind of happy.) The track resembles a laptop mutation of the drones of My Bloody Valentine, but these warmer hues only pop out of the bleak canvas occasionally. This contrast makes for an absorbing whole, and one that comes highly recommended to admirers of pure sound.

-Mark Richard-San