The Beta Band's Steve Mason is responsible for some of the most stunningly creative psychedelic music to come along in the last ten years, and with his full-time band in their prime, Mason seems brimming over with new ideas. The Beta Band are, thus far, best known for their 1999 compilation album, The Three EPs. Its borderline-folk melodies, inventive sampled and live percussion, acoustic guitar strumming, and bizarre special effects provided an airy, spacious foundation for Mason's warm, lazy vocals and infectious hooks.

Detractors insist The Three EPs falls apart around the half-way mark, when the seven-minute jam, "The House Song," and the colossal 15-minute montage, "Monolith," materialize. But these songs, while far from being the band's most accessible pieces, exemplify the group's love for collage and their quest to map the unexplored regions of popular music. And if these songs initially seem overwhelming, the entirety of the album's third EP, Los Amigos del Beta Bandidos, offers the record's finest example of the band's capabilities to fuse unique technological experimentalism with rootsy, sing-along choruses.

The band's self-titled, full-length debut came later in 1999, and while somewhat spottier than The Three EPs, it contains the band's greatest accomplishments. It's worth slogging through the sampled body-noise and unfocused dance beat of "Dance O'er the Border" and the overlong, if joyous, chant of "Number 15" to reach such apexes of musical innovation as the dark, reflective psychedelia of "The Hard One," and the blissful, ingenious beauty of "The Cow's Wrong."

But before all this, there was King Biscuit Time, frontman Steve Mason's less evolved, but equally sophisticated, solo project. In 1998, Astralwerks released, in limited quantities, Mason's first four-track EP, King Biscuit Time Sings Nelly Foggit's Blues in "Me and the Pharoahs." Now, after languishing in obscurity, Nelly Foggit's Blues has been reissued in America as the second half of the new King Biscuit Time EP, No Style.

Nelly Foggit's Blues opens on what initially seems like a startlingly dated note, with a spastic jungle beat and quaking bursts of bass. But within seconds, Mason's distinct, casual baritone floats to the surface, soaked in boundless reverb and drug-haze. In under three minutes, he delivers a rapid sung/spoken novel with the ease and fluidity of the Dismemberment Plan's Travis Morrison. The track is balanced with muddy, nebulaic production.

The sparse "Little White," which consists of a simple keyboard part and layered vocals, spotlights the detatched emotion in Mason's lyrics that is often buried under piles of exploding effects. His indifference in the delivery of lines like, "I'd love to love you/ But I'll never know you," is the secret ingredient that makes them so affecting. Nelly Foggit's Blues closes with "Eye o' the Dug," an early prototype of the Beta Band approach to creating music. Mason recorded four separate, sped-up vocal parts that harmonize and play off one another as if they're all different people practising a song they're still learning the lyrics to.

Of course, two years have passed since Nelly Foggit's Blues was released, and the intensive studio experience Mason gained while recording the massive Beta Band catalog is immediately identifiable. No Style is a decidedly less-Beta affair than Nelly Foggit's Blues-- it showcases Mason's knack for incorporating incomparable melodies into ethereal and surreal drugscapes, and for blending organic and treated sounds into a seemingly innate marriage of technology and nature.

No Style's leadoff, "I Walk the Earth," is an upbeat excursion through labyrinthine dance rhythms and understated, multi-layered vocal parts that builds, over six minutes, into a highly melodic orgy of keyboard flourishes and attenuated chimes. The record's instrumental track, "Untitled," is far more focused than Nelly Foggit's Blues' meandering "Niggling Discrepancy"-- it extracts a crystalline melody from warm, electronic pings more closely associated with µ-Ziq and early Squarepusher. "I Love You," on the other hand, takes all. The best of these eight songs, it features Mason professing his devotion over cascading xylophones, gently picked guitar, and hallucinogenic acoustics.

Still, these EPs are less for the casual listener than they are for the die-hard. Though they feature a great deal of top-shelf material, the two Beta Band full-lengths attempt similar heroics to more successful effect. Of course, if you've already immersed yourself in The Three EPs and The Beta Band and hunger for more, there could be few better ways to spend $10.

-Ryan Schreiber