Animated by only three artists, the San Francisco-based multidisciplinary collective Discord Aggregate quickly established itself as one of the most prolific, eclectic, puzzling, and overall exciting art groups in America. Their activities encompass music, literature, video art, web art, and Internet events, but their works reaching the widest audience (and that's still very small) are their music productions.

Writer A. Molotkov met S.B. Reda, an ex-musician who turned to visual arts and literature, in June 1994. They started to write and produce video art together. In February 1996, they decided to leave Albany, NY, to establish themselves in San Francisco, CA. A month later, on March 18, to be precise, they met singer/experimental artist Pamela Zero in front of the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. They immediately decided to create Discord Aggregate, a collective that would embrace any and all art forms. Work starts on The Attack of the Absolute Zero, a non-opera that will be recorded a few months later and released on CD in September 1997. Focused on the voice, spoken and sung, it blends literature and experimental music in a form that recalls but is not quite a hörspiel.

The album is only one aspect of Discord Aggregate's activities. A website (www.discord-aggregate.com) is devised to host all projects, including the turn of the century interactive Internet art "The Tower of Babble." In late 1998, recording of the second CD, The Texture of the Sky, was finished, in parallel with a novel by the same title from Molotkov and Reda. This time around, the group decided not to hire studio musicians and handle all instruments themselves. The CD was released in July 2001.

The Attack of the Absolute Zeros is one of a kind. Presented as a "free jazz non-opera," it blends spoken words, vocal experiments, free jazz, and sound art with a narrative that feels like a postmodern version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This first music production was collectively conceived by the three members of Discord Aggregate, although one can easily assume that singer Pamela Zero took care of the musical compositions, while writers A. Molotkov and S.B. Reda handled the libretto. This time around the trio reached out for studio musicians: guitarist Byron Rynes, saxophonist Zeppi Salerno, keyboardist Scott Mayfield, bassist Tony Johnson, and drummer Jason Willard were brought in to add flesh on some numbers, representing about half of the album. The remaining half features complex textures of vocals, spoken or sung. Listeners are told of the story of the Absolute Zeros, alien invaders: "They came in the shape of zeros and proceeded to devour all" ("The Descent"). They abduct humans by draining their energy and making them cold. The whole album tells about their taking over the Earth. Reda narrates with true acting talents. Zero's voice is the real musical interest here: warm, flexible, captivating. She goes from bel canto to screams and multi-layered compositions. The music itself reach heights in "Zero Cold," a funky free jazz tune, the more free-form "Spin" and the Gong-tinged "Be and Be and Be and Be." Fans of strange hörspiels, vintage sci-fi, and experimental vocal music should definitely give this CD a listen. And it's easier to get into than the collective's 2001 follow-up, The Texture of the Sky.

The Attack of the Absolute Zeros had been written and recorded only months after A. Molotkov, S.B. Reda, and Pamela Zero formed Discord Aggregate. Although ideas showed a commending level of maturity, the album relied on session musicians. By mid-1998, S.B. Reda had come back to music and Molotkov was learning keyboards, violin, and percussion. Therefore The Texture of the Sky (released in July 2001) became an autarkical effort. Consequently it shows a deeper integration of its literary and musical aspects, but also a more complex, even twisted structure that makes it more difficult to get into than the generally linear plot of the previous CD. The Texture of the Sky is based on an interactive novel by Molotkov and Reda. The plot can be summed up in one sentence: the sky wants you to dream, you want to wake up. The album is comprised of six vocal and music works split into short parts (none of the 31 tracks runs over four minutes). These sections are scattered all over the CD and the listener is encouraged to use the random function of the CD player to generate his or her own sequence (although ending with "The Message" is very nice). The technique is similar to The Attack of the Absolute Zeros: a story with a narrator and characters is interpreted and blended with Pamela Zero's multi-tracked vocal pieces and musical accompaniments. The latter part has significantly improved and features very strong loose compositions that enhance the dream effect. Of course, this CD is better when listened to under perfect conditions, with no distractions and with headphones. Strongly recommended to avant-garde fans, especially those interested in hörspiels.

You've probably heard little or nothing like Attack of the Absolute Zeros before. Its creators describe it as a "non-opera", and that's pretty apt -- while bearing some conceptual similarities to opera, it's about as close to your average Puccini work as a nuclear explosion is to a candle flame. Attack... lives up to its name -- a dizzying combination of acapella vocals, freeform jazz, spoken narration, cut-and-paste sound effects and other sonic distractions. It's definitely one for the headphones -- there's a lot of panning and funky imaging stuff going on in the mix that you'll miss in a larger listening venue. And the story? Well, the libretto is thoughtfully provided in the CD booklet, which is good as it's possible to get so caught up in listening that you lose track of the rather freeform plot, which deals with the invasion of Earth by a bunch of faceless, identical "zeros". Humanity rapidly succumbs to the powers of these unfriendly null-values -- after all, anything multiplied by zero is zero, so the zeros' ranks swell with converted humans. As you might expect, the zeros are an allegorical foe, and the disk ends with an exhortation to listeners not to succumb -- to avoid the cold, artless sameness of modern life and to sustain creativity and individuality. The message of Attack... is laudable, but the method of delivery is what makes the disc truly unique. For more information, or to get a copy and see what I'm talking about, visit the website.

Discord Aggregate is a San Francisco based group of multimedia based experimental artists. Some may remember their previous release The Attack of the Absolute Zeros (a jazz non-opera) from 1997, reviewed in issue #14. The Texture of the Sky is an even more ambitious project, described in its own liner notes as “...an interactive novel in which you are the main character.” One might imagine this album as six distinct pieces or themes, plus an epilog, broken into 31 pieces and then scrambled, much like a movie with six parallel plots that somehow manage to work together. The pieces stretch the boundaries of art and music, fusing spoken theatrical ideas with classical, world music, minimalism, and industrial textures, with melodic (and sometimes treated) vocals. The three principals are Pamela Zero, S.B.Reda, and A.Molotkov, all who contribute vocals and instrumentation (percussion, guitar, bass, violin, keyboards, sax, sitar and electronics), often multi-tracked. While many of the ideas here are laced with pure experimentation, they maintain a strong artistic sensibility that fuses well with the expressive imagery of the story line as it continues. Some parts of this sonic continuum are very dense with sounds and voices, while others are sparse and minimalistic, and the contrasts that flow and juxtapose within the overall piece certainly work well to make this an engaging listen. Highly recommended for the open minded, explorative listener.

After a week or two of reviewing indie rock records, I usually need a break from guitar-jangle and off-key vocals. I want to hear something weird -- an odd little art recording, perhaps, or a semi-coherent spoken word piece. Something out of the ordinary, in other words. If you share my need for peculiarity, your ship has come in. The Texture of the Sky doesn't merely let its freak flag fly; it will chase you down the street, swinging and jabbing at your head with the flagpole.

Three and a half years ago, I reviewed Discord Aggregate's "non-opera" The Attack of the Absolute Zeros, an allegorical tale of individuality presented with stunning attention to spatialization and audio trickery. The Attack of the Absolute Zeros was defiantly, sometimes mouth-foamingly weird...but The Texture of the Sky makes it sound like a Raffi record.

The Discord Aggregate collective -- S. B. Reda, Pamela Zero and A. Molotkov -- offers its own descriptions of The Texture of the Sky. On the disc's back cover, they call it "over 60 minutes of joyful tension." This seems true enough, if overly succinct. The Texture of the Sky is definitely full of, and the source of, tension (though, as my wife's response to the disc makes clear, not all of it is necessarily joyful). The inner sleeve offers a little more detail, describing The Texture of the Sky as "...an interactive novel in which you are the main character. You travel through a series of dreams imposed by the Sky, choosing your destination at the end of each page. The Sky is an information vampire trying to absorb the reality of your dreams and keep you dreaming forever."

In other words, it's what happens when you combine dimethyltriptamine with Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Six individual "works" -- combinations of repeated musical sequences, spoken word segments and unclassifiable noise -- most divided into multiple tracks, make up the disc. The tracks are not in order, but shuffled together in a seemingly haphazard fashion; "The Center", for instance, is made up of tracks five, nine, 11, 15, 17, 21, 24, 27 and 30. Needless to say, using your CD player's "shuffle play" feature isn't going to make things any less coherent, and indeed Discord Aggregate encourages it. Voices mutter, howl, chant, scream and sing; phrases like "The growth experience has not yet begun", "You are staggering down a long corridor" and the cryptic "Zabda Rect" crop up over and over. There seems to be a subplot about "getting through customs", but it's hard to tell what, precisely, that means in the disc's context; real world details are all too quickly subverted by metaphor, allegory and...well, odd noises. The music -- texture-intensive combinations of violin, sitar, guitar, keyboards, theremin and various drums -- offers no clues, either.

Despite its intractability, and the fact that as an overall experience it's often uncomfortably like being trapped in an elevator with a performance art troupe, The Texture of the Sky is oddly vibrant. It's full of life and energy, bubbling over with a seething desire to create, create, create, to push at the boundaries of art and entertainment. Sometimes it's disturbing, and on a few occasions it's amateurish, but it's rarely gratuitously "artsy" or willfully obscure -- which, if you think about it, is what makes most performance art annoying. It's a harrowing experience, to be sure, but it will leave you energized -- and oddly compelled to listen again. Or it may be the single most annoying, horrifying thing you've ever heard. Or, most likely, both.