Qvaris is the new release by the No-Neck Blues Band, a loose collective of New York and Boston improvisers formed in 1992. Since then they've released over a dozen CDs and/or albums and caused a fair amount of chaos, but through it all they've managed to keep their privacy and integrity intact. Based these days in Harlem at the Hint House, the NNCK continues to create and transcend with ferocious honesty, with Qvaris the latest offering from their world.

Although the NNCK has been referred to as everything from "noise" to "improv-folk", it's wisest not to play the category game and instead let Qvaris enter unannounced. Having said that, Qvaris is music to fall into, eleven sonic reachings of the highest order, ranging from primordial trance glimmers to kaleidoscopic intergalactic musings. Qvaris has large motifs, and it has fine bead-weavings as well. The semi-apocalyptic harmonies converge with shamanistic equations, and the CD is nothing less than an electronic vision quest. There's energy here, but gentleness, too; the listener is led into aural worlds with no maps, but since these archetypal soundscapes go right to the heart of the One-Mind, there's no real way to get lost.

The fascinating thing about this music is that while it's rich and multi-layered, it doesn't impose itself upon the listener, doesn't set a grid on the ears. As the group says, "So here, undiluted and without an accompanying agenda, is Qvaris for its own sake. It is finding your mind as we speak." To offer music and leave space for mind journeys is generosity indeed, and anyone looking for new ways to hear might want to leap this way.