Jaap Blonk seems like the captain on this ship's epic voyage of expressionism, led by the sound poet's intriguing, at times bizarre, at times tender and touching blasts of vocal inflections, making it very clear how charged with meaning vocal sounds can be.

The musicians joining Blonk for this gab extravaganza of the very unconventional sort are trombonist Jeb Bishop, turntable and electronics artist Lou Mallozzi and percussionist Frank Rosaly. Captured live at the legendary Chicago venue, this is music to shake, rattle and roll your ears and nerves and brain... which is all good.

Vowels, fricatives, liquids, glottal stops, gurgles, snorts and many more kinds of vocal sounds start "Ace Gotoid," which launches the hour-long disc, and about a minute in Bishop's trombone jumps in, followed by Rosaly's percussive obbligato and Lammozzi's electronic rubbings. Abstract is a word that comes to mind, but one cannot help but quickly notice the inappropriateness and irony of that word, as these are very concrete sounds, indeed.

The five pieces on the disc add up to a sequence of tone poems celebrating the human spirit, with enigmatic titles ("Ace Gotoid," "Tido Chage," "Couch Ogah," "Cachoo Tug," and "Hiccogh It") that reflect some of the tonal and timbral content although we're in the land of non-referential, plastic materials, where expressionism reigns supreme. Along with Blonk's voice, we get a tandem selection of sampled voices (radio source?) in some of the pieces, as in "Tido Chage," which is fragmented into splinters of phonemes that divorce sound from semantics of the usual variety. In "Couch Ogah" the power of the whisper comes through loud and clear and is spiced with a pastiche of sampled vocal sounds. John Cage would have approved. In a similar vein, "Cachoo Tug" seems to parody the syntax and inflections of human speech, and continues with some of the aforementioned aesthetic practices.

The full array of the concepts informing this live recording is elaborated in the 16-minute final piece "Hiccogh It," which is remarkable for the range of expressive resources and the richness of the textures created by the quartet.

If one of the purposes of art is to remind us of essences, of the qualities and characteristics of plastic materials, of the magic, the beauty and nastiness of life itself, then this set of pieces does a remarkable job.