"Steve Austin. Astronaut. A man barely alive."

"Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better... stronger... faster."

Blame television. Forty-five minutes of some of the most complex, challenging music I've heard in a while, and I still can't get the opening sequence of "The Six Million Dollar Man" out of my head. It's caught in a feedback loop now, punctuated only by the digital slinky sound effect that accompanied every instance of Col. Austin's extraordinary bionics. Well that, and Briggan Krauss surfacing enigmatically.

Descending to End is bionic jazz. Nine alto saxophone pieces composed and performed by New York-by-way-of-Seattle saxophonist Briggan Krauss in an empty room at the Knitting Factory, laid out on the cold steel slab of a studio operating table, fitted with robot eyes and limbs, and sealed in some grotesque plastic that one would never know was not human skin. Krauss' music is one red tracksuit away from a lawsuit.

Well, that's not quite true. Just because I'm doomed to refract everything through the grainy prism of syndicated television doesn't automatically mean litigation pending. In fact, Krauss' bionic jazz actually emerges without precedent as one of the few convincing electro-organic hybrids to emerge from fringe jazz in recent years. The line between experimental and canned is a fine one: one knob a quarter-degree in the wrong direction and the human element is lost, irretrievably. Krauss commands attention precisely because the humanity of Descending to End is kept anxiously in jeopardy.

"Last Gasp Extinction of the World" crosses cryptic David Grubbs-style plucking with the maximal turntablism associated with composers like Christian Marclay. Machines hum listlessly from every corner of the stereo spectrum. Krauss' heavily treated sax ribbons through this little Armageddon with skittering intensity, alternately muttering and waxing digitally huge in the cacophony.

"Frontal" is solo sax so overburdened by effects that it becomes indistinguishable from a similarly encumbered guitar solo; the track would sit comfortably just about anywhere on Sonny Sharrock's Guitar without anyone ever noticing the switch. The few moments that yield to these avant-heroics play something like Kevin Costner's ham-fisted epics: a billion dollars of digitally mastered dire apocalyptic chaos just to make rooting for Costner plausible. These kind of antics are disappointingly traditionalist even as they pose as futurism; the upshot is: you'll appreciate the superhuman clarion of the classic alto sax solo once you've heard it overcome the nightmarish din of reverberating electronics. It becomes condescending. Fundamentally, we already know the Good Guys from the Bad Guys.

These moments, though, are few and far between. "Lean Loud and Lovely," for instance, screams like a premature burial. You can hear Krauss clawing at the coffin; his saxophone is so unnervingly human in its wail that it almost approaches articulated language. What would it say amidst all the whooshing effects and pounding cymbals that have entombed it? "I'm still alive down here," perhaps. That's creepy.

The grotesque insect dread of "Dust the Desolate" is cut by dentist-drill squeal. This track sounds so much like my nightmares it's uncanny: equal parts delirium tremens, dental checkup and insane asylum. I swear, if this is jazz, it is jazz infested with maggots. The sound on headphones triggers hallucinations. Seriously sick hallucinations. Even if the rest of the disc were simply avant-dreck (which it's not), this track would warrant purchase. Clocking in at almost ten minutes, "Dust the Desolate" makes you forget there was ever such a thing as jazz, or woodwinds, or life on this planet.

And Krauss never looks back. The nostalgia for traditional jazz was incinerated somewhere along the way, and we've forgotten to mourn. The final "Flu Coasting" reintegrates the turntable, featuring half-backward vocals that sound like all those satanic messages I never actually found on my metal LPs. Something like electro-sitar plucks an eerily simple melody as if straining toward an inner calm. This isn't music to drive to; this is what the last five minutes of your life sound like.

As is requisite in all my NYC apologetics, a warning: you must accept Descending to End for what it is: difficult, often horrifying music. Not for parties. Not for traffic jams. Not for sex. For headphones, hallucinogens and utter darkness. Once you get past Lee Majors, you're gone.

-Brent S. Sirota