Building on the new recording style introduced in Horror Part IV � The Thing with Two Heads, (live, real-time recordings in a studio set up with a variety of instruments and without the overdubbed collaging that made up much of his earlier home recordings), Chadbourne here creates a suite for prepared, and very prepared, guitar.

The result is more musical than the kill-your-fathers destruction of Part IV, but is no less personal. Chadbourne approaches each of the eight pieces like a problem to solve. Unfortunately, we don�t get any clues to the preparations of the instruments, but the impression is of the artist facing instruments outfitted with metal mutes and clips deadening the strings and, like a not-necessarily-stoned-but-experienced Anne-Sullivan, teaching them to sing.

Individually, the pieces are a series of noisy meditations. Distortion and overtone, quiet and brutal, unmuted strings ringing in the breeze, the tracks are challenging minuets exploring 6-string sonorities. As a whole, Horror Part V is a keyhole through which one can glimpse what it is the guitarist finds musical, when it is that he happens on a buzz deserving special attention or just the right sequence of hammered notes to force through a broken amp. Like the work of Derek Bailey and other great guitar experimenters, this isn�t guitar music so much as music about guitars, and as such might be most rewarding for other guitarists. It�s not about prowess and dexterity. It�s an attempt (not the first, but a solid one) to discover the full vocabulary of the instrument, the as-yet uncharted sounds contained within. As such, it�s a fascinating, viable work.