An air of mystery surrounds Bablicon, and it goes much deeper than band members naming themselves Blue Hawaii, the Dimisher and Marta Tennae. For one thing, it's just about impossible to figure out what the hell they're up to. They have one member of Neutral Milk Hotel (drummer Tennae, who is known as Jeremy Barnes outside of Bablicon); other members have a background in the Chicago improv scene. Together, they are making music. Not rock music, not electronic music, not folk music, not jazz music, though, at various points, they might be doing any one of those things. Just music. Any modifier you might attach to the word limits it, which would simply not do. No limitations, no boundaries-- this seems to be the Bablicon creed.

After last year's The Orange Tapered Moon-- which found the band making smart use of electronics in addition to channeling the emotion of Albert Ayler and the surrealism of Beefheart-- Bablicon return in 2001 with a dense album seemingly inspired by silent film scores, German cabaret, and vaudeville, while still incorporating noisy interludes and assorted indescribable fragments.

Many of the tunes on the first half of A Flat Inside a Fog, The Cat That Was a Dog are dominated by piano, with a wide variety of instruments outlining dissonant, haunting melodies that seem remembered from a flickering black-and-white past. Strings supplied by the "Alien Orchestra," and even greater deployment of multi-tracked harmonized reed lines, makes this band seem much larger than it actually is. On this record, Bablicon are like the house band from a nickel cinema learning how to incorporate field recordings and free jazz into their sound.

But the strangest thing is that these tunes, many of which seem to be working in a long-forgotten tradition, don't feel nostalgic or tied to any particular era. Though the music sounds only a little like Tom Waits, Bablicon have a similar knack for using "old" elements and in ways that the originators never could have imagined. Kurt Weill never had the opportunity to run an organ through a distortion pedal. W.C. Handy died before lungs-out blowing became as valid as melody. Richard Strauss never wrote charts under the influence of LSD. And so on.

As on The Orange Tapered Moon, The Cat That Was a Dog opens with a vocal track called "Blue Hawaii," which recalls an old showtune. "Traveling" could be a Gershwin interlude played on piano, bass, clarinet and soprano saxophone, with the feel of the old south, sweaty and evocative. "Animals" is the first track to feature the Alien Orchestra, possibly a string quartet recorded to sound distant and thin. Opening with field recordings of a train station, "Saumar/Paris/Tea Towels" becomes a bouncy sax instrumental, moves back to atmospheric sound, and then tacks on another brilliant section of Aylerian folk played on c melody and soprano sax and oboe by the Dimisher.

Perhaps sensing that they had too many musical ideas to stuff into the 36 minutes of last year's record, A Flat Inside a Fog is 65 minutes long with lots of weird experimental tracks that some might describe as "filler," but which I term "the good stuff." "Smell of Ovoustic" is heavily treated tapes of a clarinet, sounding like an early synthesizer recording meant to mimic the sound of deep space. Another brief highlight is "Ape Hall," 32 seconds of manipulated orchestra recordings-- perhaps the sound of an early talkie being munched in a projector.

For all the cinematic references, it's true that A Flat Inside a Fog works best in a single sitting, heard to start to finish. These fragments and detours start to make sense when lined up in a row, as the mood crests and falls with the incredibly varied music. Bablicon may remain an enigma, but the music speaks for itself rather well.

-Mark Richard-San