I know what you're thinking. The third Grassy Knoll review in a month. And not one of the albums were even released this year. They weren't even reviewed in order: III first, then the self- titled debut, now Positive, an album released in 1996. 1996! I can't even think back to '96. Not since the Call. Time has become an inconvenience, or rather, an impossibility. I never applied for this position. Mr. Schreiber sent me a handwritten letter by courier inviting me to write for Pitchfork, along with the keys to an apartment in Chicago and a check cut for $10,000.

I left my sparse but sunlit apartment in the East Village in New York-- a short hop from the Library, my favorite bar, and a brisk walk from Mamoun's Falafel-- to be nearer to the corridors of power. I don't even remember what month I came out here. Like I said, time at Pitchfork tends to be somewhat impossible.

I have never seen Mr. Schreiber. They say he never leaves the offices. I have spoken to him once: his voice was husky and torn from heavy smoking. I asked him how he got my name and he laughed phlegmatically for a few seconds and coughed for the balance of a minute. I will never forget what he said to me: "Men, Mr. Sirota, do not want freedom. Not a bit. What men really desire is order. No, there is only one thing in this world that truly craves freedom. Do you know what that is, Mr. Sirota?" I must have answered in the negative. "Information," he said. "Information wants to be free." This was his answer to my question, and the conclusion of our only interface.

I get discs in the mail at irregular intervals. I turn in reviews as often as possible. I have never had a visitor here. I have never seen a bill. The super even does repairs on my apartment while I'm out. Blown lightbulbs are fixed before I even tell anyone that they've burnt out, and checks come on the first and the fifteenth of the month, without fail.

The other writers range from paranoid to psychotic. Information is not free among them. No, among the writers, information is proximity and proximity is power. Rumor and conjecture abound. I've heard that Brent DiCrescenzo has been in the lotus position in an empty room for years. Never comes in. Never goes out. Wouldn't know a computer if it fell on him. Nevertheless, his reviews proceed without fail. Some say insight is but an act of will. And the will is a trick of the mind.

I have also heard that Chip Chanko is an alias-- that he has no name, no real identity the way you and I think of these things. He once sent me an email with one sentence: "Invisibility is the first condition of wisdom," it read. All attempts at a reply bounced back. We are all nameless men, in a way. Some have even suggested that there are no other writers here-- just variations on the same story, the same profound absence.

What do these observations about the turn my life has taken have to do with Positive, the second album by the Grassy Knoll. Well, I guess what I'm getting at is, when three outdated Grassy Knoll albums appear in your mailbox, you review them. This is the logic of the Corporation. The way to avoid answers is to render questions obsolete. This is the logic of the Corporation. Do you know what rationality is? It's a card trick. You take things that are already in order and make them look random so that when they appear in order again, the people think it's magic. And in some sense, it is magic. To see that the cards were always already in order. This is what Pitchfork does: parlor games, magic tricks, spectacles for the eye and the mind. This is what I do now. What they pay me for.

Positive is a half- step forward from the band's self- titled debut from the previous year. The electronics are thicker and the sound is conspiratorially complex. But the distortion- laden guitars grow almost Kravitz- like in musculature, and they tend to clog the arteries of the whole system at times. There are certainly affinities to big beat; what the Chemical Brothers' Dig Your Own Hole was to a real rock album, Positive is to a real fusion- jazz album. There's digital noise, elegantly placed smoke and mirrors, and some inspired live players wailing on cue. The rest is wizardry on the big boards.

The album is nearly impossible to dislike because the sound works at such corporeal levels: stomping rhythm, ethereal horns, reverberating guitars all looped with taste and economy. But having reviewed the three Grassy Knoll albums out of order as asked has made the band's progression all the more apparent. Where the debut is somewhat grungy and simpleminded, Positive is considerably more nimble, posing at times as a dead ringer for the heavy- treated cognitive funk of Material. Last year's III is simply the culmination, achieving a fierce originality of sound in its dark oceanic sway.

It doesn't matter if you buy it. If doesn't even matter if you like it. All that matters is that I've reached you-- reached your homes and cubicles. The content is meaningless, only the networks of interface matter. Illuminate the evenings with flutters of electric chatter. You are not the enemy. We are not the enemy. There is only we two and the abysms of silence that fall between us regardless. Its almost as if I hadn't said a word all night.

-Brent S. Sirota