I listened to the Neutral Milk Hotel albums a lot, but not so much in recent years. I felt like one of the few chumps there who couldn’t sing along with all the lyrics, even the really loopy ones. The audience mostly opted to double Mangum an octave lower; Jordan Hall has a very warm natural reverb, and it sounded pretty good. Mangum did some Q&A between songs, kinda like David Bazan does, which contributed to the intimate atmosphere. Spellbinding.

String quartet opener ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble) treated us to a more-than-competent run through Satie’s Les Gymnopédies and an often stunning arrangement of Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, which I had somehow never encountered before. (In retrospect this seems odd; I can almost imagine one of my former band leaders sitting us all down and making us listen to it at tortilla point, or some such.) It’s odd-but-somehow-logical cadence has a clear structural kinship with Mangum’s cover choice for the evening, Daniel Johnston’s “True Love Will Find You in the End,” (although Johnston’s tune is set in a more conventional time structure) and it’s certainly not hard to hear its influence in Mangum’s own work.

I’m tempted not even to mention that is sort of an indie/alt/electronic supergroup, founded by Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda and That Dog’s Petra Haden, bolstered by Cornelius’ Hirotaka Shimizu and Yuko Araki, because If By Yes sounds nothing like the members’ best-known projects. It’s a far cry from the melodic alternarock of That Dog, the aural aggression of Cornelius, and the kitchen sink aesthetic of Cibo Matto. Those aren’t criticisms, just observations — I think Salt on Sea Glass deserves to be judged on its own terms, not saddled with expectations based on what its members used to do.

And I like much of it quite a bit, especially “You’re Something Else.”

But L’essentiel finally provides US listeners with a (legitimate) way to hear 2 songs — “Dans la glace” and “Un toit étranger” — from Holden’s brilliant Fantomatisme, perhaps my favorite 2009 release. Fantomatisme walks a crazy tightrope between the fragility of largely acoustic arrangements and Armelle Pioline’s voice, and Uwe Schmidt (aka Señor Coconut)’s otherworldly electronics. It’s simultaneously hushed and noisy, arresting and compelling, and not quite like anything else I’ve ever heard. It’s also virtually impossible to (legally) hear it in the United States; Amazon says We don’t know when or if [the CD] will be back in stock; no digital service I could find is licensed to sell Fantomatisme in the US.

I think record companies that want to survive need to remove all barriers between music and the people actually willing to pay for it. Nationalistic protectionism isn’t doing anything but depriving Holden and their (former, I hope) label of resources to help create Holden’s next release (which I really want to hear). Anywhere in the world, you ought to be able to type “holden fantomatisme” into Google and get a link to buy it. You can’t. But you can get a link to hear it. (Although you may need to dip your web browser in lye afterwards.)

In the meantime, at least L’essential is readily available from Amazon’s MP3 store or iTunes.

There’s a nice interview with Stein at in your speakers.

Not entirely dissimilar recordings are sold as relaxation aids, not as music, but labeling this recording as music — and giving it the formal length of almost exactly one hour — invites the listener to look for the things we expect in music: motifs, variation, repetition: structure. The length of the piece doesn’t make it easy to determine how structured it is: there are discontinuities of volume, but do they follow long crescendos? It’s hard to say. Was that car perhaps the same car from ten minutes ago? The listener can also look for structure at the micro scale. We don’t usually think of cicadas or grasshoppers or whatever they are in terms of notes and chords, but it’s certainly possible to transcribe them as such.* And there’s also the “4:33″-ish dimension: by nature, Galaxies will interact with the sound in your listening environment, so, arguably, you can’t hear it exactly the same way twice.**

Giving the piece the title “Galaxies” further invites the listener to look for meaning in the soundscape and/or the selection/structuring of it. Is Asano making a statement about the quantity and diversity of life? Or perhaps about how closely examined things reveal complexities of structure not originally apparent? (Points of light become pinwheels of points of light & so on.)

With pieces like this I can also rarely discount the possibility that playing a joke on the audience is an aspect of the work (to a greater or lesser degree), but Galaxies has another interesting meta dimension: it’s the product of a prolific artist — Asano’s 44th album — but it follows a several year drought between releases, which might suggest that Asano finds it particularly important (or worked particularly hard and long at the creative decisions it embodies).

Galaxies is well outside my comfort zone and musical expertise. I can’t say I get it, or even that I enjoyed it. But I did find it very thought-provoking, and I’m not sorry I devoted an hour to it.

Asano makes it uncommonly easy to experience his work, if you’re so inclined: You can download his entire catalog at Koji Asano.com.

* this sort of reasoning always makes me think of a science fiction/fantasy story that made an enormous impression on youngun-me called (I think) “Rites of Spring” (or maybe “The Rite of Spring”) that started out with the unbalanced scientist protagonist decoding a message in the pattern of raindrops hitting his windshield. The Internets have not helped me track it down. Apparently it was not published in F&SF as I thought.

** True of all music taken to extremes, I suppose, but much more evident here than in a 3-minute pop song.

In Pellet Gun’s hands the song is almost-but-not-quite unrecognizable without the lyric. The slightly sneery talk-sung vocal recalls Henry Rollins (especially on “Slip It In”) or Big Black’s Albini, with just a dash of the brilliant, demented disrespect Artie Sinatra brought to Dinosaur Jr’s covers of Young’s “Lotta Love” and The Byrd’s “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better.” The sheer quantity of guitar noise reminded me of Book of Knot’s magnificent deconstruction of “The Ballad of John Henry” from Traineater, but although both tracks are amply spiky, “John Henry” lurches, but “Rock and Roll” drives.

I really want to hear more from this band and/or the people in it, but the album credits only have this to say about Pellet Gun: Eric, Guitar; Dave: Bass; Brian: Drums. Any additional info would be appreciated. The only “Pellet Gun” I can find on the Internetubes is an Arkansan blues/funk/rock act — very clearly not them.

Partly this is because Hussalonia is really good*, partly it’s because they (mostly just he — Jesse Mank basically is Hussalonia, although he has some collaborators on some tracks) is strikingly diverse, encompassing minimalist folk, musique concrète, power pop, heavy metal — too many genres to list. Like the work of many of my favorite songwriters, Mank’s songs are frequently funny and serious simultaneously; they’re seldom straightforwardly jokey. (His track-by-track re-invention of Billy Joel’s 1980 new-wave cash-in album Glass Houses is no joke; it’s a revelation.**)

“For Those About to Rock, We Ignore You,” is one of those tunes that makes me smile and wince at the same time and it melds a couple of Mank’s aesthetic directions. It’s about how unpleasant it can sometimes be to make it through a local band’s set to hear the band you came to see (or are in). This is certainly familiar territory for me.*** Mank approaches it with delicate picked acoustic guitar and a hushed, appropriately world-weary vocal. But what lifts it into the realm of the extraordinary are the underlying layers of guitar feedback — noisy, but melodically smart, and at least partly belying the sentiment of the lyric. (Another of Mank’s projects, Satan Among the Sofa Cushions, is a heavy metal EP that is too successful as metal to be dismissed as parody, even if Mank’s tongue is clearly in his cheek.)

Jesse Mank is manifestly uninterested in participating in the industry part of the music industry; his recent catalogue is only distributed digitally, and he gives the vast bulk of it away free on the entertaining and informative Hussalonia website.

*Triple-threat good: he’s an outstanding songwriter, a gifted multi-instrumentalist, and displays much more solid recording chops than I expect from indie home-recordists.

**Glass Houses was one of the first three LPs I ever bought, but while I still like Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits 74-78 and even some of Foreigner’s self-titled album, Glass Houses was the first record I disowned. I used an exacto to cut up the cover so it said “Mr. Shit” instead of “Billy Joel.” I hadn’t thought of that in years, and certainly never regretted it until Mank’s amazing renditions made me want to A-B against the original.

***For a couple years I’ve been trying to finish writing a song that starts “There’s not enough booze in this bar/To get me through another set by your band/And there’s not enough beer in my glass/To get me through one more song/But I’m too cheap to waste half a drink/So I guess I’ll buy another round.” Mank’s lyric is much better than mine; also, he finished his.