Quietly and with little fanfare, New York's Azul Discografica label has carved out a particularly unique niche for itself. With only a few releases under its belt, the imprint understands what's required to win over admirers (and consumers) via two necessary, synergistic forces-establishing an artistically potent, visual brand linked to equally galvanic, categorically-diverse audio. Undoubtedly the label founders (of which Mr. Fankbonner is one-half) have launched their enterprise with what is one of the finest design "homages" in recent memory: digipak covers that mirror the BYG Actuel series of avant-garde jazz issues. All that established, coupled with its sonic brother, El Pabellon is one juicy bite at the Apple.

Musique concr�te informs the proceedings here, or, more accurately, concrete music. Fankbonner apparently sourced all the attendant sounds from right outside his Harlem apartment's window, dumping them on to a four-track recorder, augmented by a microphone, a sampler, and whatever cognitive mixing skills he brought to the table. The result straddles the borders between painterly-daubed Pollock-like collage and the kind of avant splicing primitivism so beloved of composers Pierre Schaefer, Jerome Noetinger, or any one of the vast Canadian acousmatic professors who have set up shop over the years on that country's Empreintes Digitales label.

The dramatis personae scattered amidst El Pabellon's grimy grooves are but ciphers in Fankbonner's urban futurist engineering (imagineering?). Cardboard boxes crushed, styrofoam slabs disintegrated, metal trapdoors slammed, footsteps masticating trash into asphalt, taxi horns bleating out amelodic swirls of rusty-belled cacophony: it's all recorded, disassembled and reconvened in Fankbonner's swampy mix, a metropolitan landmass where the city's primal elements are transformed into a living entity of stormy drones, maximallized entrails, digitally corporeal ganglia. It's a collection of sonics at once vaguely identifiable and doggedly ectoplasmic, where the clearly etched noises are discernible but subjugated into an oceanic stream of sidewalk consciousness. Legions ahead of his European counterparts, Fankbonner's and his label's opening salvo is masterful stuff.