Lala Ryan is laughing on this record, caught mid-breath in a sample that keeps resurfacing across the tracklist like a private joke the listener has been let in on. That laugh is the clearest thing about Sunbomber, an EP Excepter recorded in 2005 while the group was, briefly, six people playing at once.
John Fell Ryan started the band in Brooklyn in 2002, not long after his time in No-Neck Blues Band, and built it around a simple, difficult premise: everyone plays, nobody synchronises. Synthesisers, samplers, drums, vocals and Lala's flute all move on their own clocks, colliding rather than locking, the way free improvisers work rather than the way rock bands usually do.
By the sextet's logic, more instruments should mean more mud.
Sunbomber refuses that. Across four short songs and a nine-minute title track, the textures stay legible even when the arrangement sounds like several sessions bleeding into one another — a synth line surfacing, a drum pattern catching up to it, a voice arriving late to its own sentence. Circuit-bent electronics buzz and short out under vocals that sound run through a tape machine left in the sun. It is the closest thing to pop the band made in this stretch, and still closer to Cecil Taylor than to any Brooklyn band it got filed alongside at the time.
Ryan has named Sunbomber among his favourites of the group's records, less for the songs than for what is stitched into them: those laughing samples, and the cover photograph of Lala standing knee-deep in Catskill Creek with her flute, taken, he says, on their third date.
That is the tension the whole record runs on — a band built on structural disorder that keeps arriving, almost by accident, at moments of real tenderness.
Excepter released Sunbomber through 5RC, a Kill Rock Stars imprint run three thousand miles away in Olympia, Washington, at the same moment Gang Gang Dance and Black Dice were working a similar seam in Brooklyn, all three worrying at the border of noise and rhythm from a small radius of lofts and basements a long way from their label's home base. Where Black Dice pushed towards abstraction, Excepter kept pulling back towards something closer to song, even as the songs threatened to come apart under their own instrumentation.
Live, the sextet worked the same way — untethered, deliberately unrehearsed, treating a gig as another take rather than a performance of finished material. Sunbomber is what that method sounds like when it briefly holds still.
