Please consider this statement in the context in which it's presented: This is a very strange Eugene Chadbourne record.

The mad Dr. Chadbourne's horror series has mutated from monster movie (and soundtrack) tribute to highly personal recordings that could challenge any blipbot with a laptop as to what quiet, sparse and difficult really mean.

The piece is a suite of sorts, a concerto for a broken 20-year-old mixing board in the process of being destroyed. Here, an axe is his axe, as he puts the board out of his misery, recording the entire process. Adding to the mayhem, Chadbourne set up the room as an orchestra, a lot of instruments and a mike in the middle. The piece opens with some unidentified, prerecorded sounds that the casual listener might consider the only music on the disc. And the casual listener may well be right. The disc is, according to the notes, a new kind of recording process for Chadbourne, sound collages made in real time with an arsenal of string instruments and amps in various states of preparation and repair. Here what you get is the occasional metallic ringing of plucked strings alternating with the sounds of the artist beating the life out of his soundboard.

The sound is sparse and fairly crazed, a bit like a postal worker on his second-to-last day on the job. Under Cagean tenets (�music is organized sound�), this may not qualify as a symphony. Any organizing principle at work here is deeply obscured. But it does have the distinct feel of someone doing something, and comes packaged with pieces of the departed mixer. Odd, evocative, unintelligible, this is, I suspect, what it sounds like inside Eugene Chadbourne's brain.