Jason Pierce must be having himself a good laugh right now. He used to be one- third of the seminal wispy- drone- pop band Spacemen 3, which broke up in 1990 following a well- publicized falling- out between him and bandmate Sonic Boom (a.k.a. Pete Kember). Eight years later finds him as the mastermind behind the psychedelic rock outfit Spiritualized, whose album Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space garnered loads of critical acclaim last year. While Pierce is getting all the good press, Sonic Boom seems to have lapsed into willful obscurity, perhaps taking the Spacemen 3 mission statement of "taking drugs to make music to take drugs to" a little too seriously-- or rather, leaving out the "making music" part entirely.

Now, Spacemen 3 never really made "music" or wrote "songs" to begin with; for the most part, they let their instruments play themselves while they mumbled breathily about God, drugs or both. Sonic Boom and third Spaceman Pete Bassman continued in that gentle, ambient vein with Spectrum, while satisfying their avant- electronic- noise jones in Experimental Audio Research, a collaboration with AMM drummer Eddie Prevost and God founder Kevin Martin, among others. While I find Spectrum and Spacemen 3 difficult to listen to without an enormous amount of patience (or chemical enhancements), I'm pretty sure that anyone would be hard- pressed to find something redeeming in E.A.R.'s latest release Millennium Music. Pretensions abound in the liner notes, which call Millennium Music a "meta- musical portrait... [that] is intended as a soundscape which reflects time from pre- history and the dinosaur age through modern digital communication and 20th century travel." Even more ambitiously, the three 20- minute tracks that make up the album were recorded live and largely improvised. It all sounds like Serious and Important Music, but in reality Millennium Music has all the effect of a low- level electromagnetic hum-- wavering frequencies, muffled bleeps and blips, and the occasional cymbal crash, all of which goes absolutely nowhere.

I'm sure that E.A.R. may be groundbreaking in some sort of avant- garde way and I'm much too feeble to understand the music's subtleties and complexities, but that means that the only people who will appreciate Millennium Music are the ones that own the entire Tzadik Records catalog and scoff at me for thinking that Tortoise is cool. More likely, it's a bunch of crap noise trying to be "experimental." I'd tell Sonic Boom not to quit his day job, but he's probably too far gone to care about writing actual music anymore; besides, he's well on his way to becoming another Syd Barrett- like drug casualty, written off as a curious footnote in the underground rock canon of the late 20th century.

-Nick Mirov