Through a steady stream of albums, EPs, podcasts, and even a double-album mix of podcasts, Brooklyn's Excepter have honed a sound both recognizable and tough to pin down. Not that it's particularly hard to describe, with its improvised electronic squiggles, dubby synth noise, criss-crossing drum machines, and zombified moans. But explaining their music by cataloging the sonic elements is like saying water tastes like hydrogen and oxygen. It doesn't catch the magic of Excepter's alchemy, how they move between comatose meandering and inspired epiphany so seamlessly it's hard to decide which is which.
Presidence, a 130-minute 2xCD set filled with half-hour-plus pieces, doesn't really make the Excepter formula any more transparent. Nor should it-- I doubt these magicians are particularly interested in revealing their tricks. But Presidence offers clearer evidence of how the band's process doesn't depend on specific sounds or formats. Put simply, Disc One is mostly classic Excepter, and Disc Two is mostly something else. That both are equally stubborn, challenging, and interesting shows how sturdy their approach is. Currently a six-piece, Excepter continue to reorganize themselves into new shapes and sizes without losing their core identity.
If you're already familiar with that identity, you might want to start your Presidence experience with Disc Two. All four pieces there explore new sounds, and each feels more repetitive than previous work, more interested in riding out one pattern or beat than morphing through several. Most striking is the title track, a 33-minute solo synth odyssey crafted by founder John Fell Ryan back in 2003 (as the press kit puts it, the band's "pre-war" days). Ryan's creative process usually manifests itself in his edits of Excepter source material, or in his mesmerizing vocals. But here we get a glimpse of his improvising methods away from his bandmates, and the result is practically an album unto itself.
Like a meditative amalgam of spacey Krautrock, Terry Riley's "all-night flight," and the synth escapades of Oneohtrix Point Never, "Presidence" moves from clusters of starry notes to big swaths of electronic noise and drone. Yet Ryan glides through it all with a stubborn anti-logic in line with Excepter's established M.O. The same is true for Disc Two's other experiments, as the band's weird sense of timing unites tracks as disparate as "Anti-Noah", an ambient piece dominted by weather-report samples, and the robotic, Residents-on-downers "Open Well".
Disc One's sounds are more familiar, but Excepter's ways of getting in and around them are just as idiosyncratic. The first half, a somnambulant half-hour suite called "Teleportation", gurgles through rattling drum-machines and low-end rumbles, reaching highest when Ryan and his co-singers Lala Harrison and Clare Amory wrap their hums together. The suite never quite wakes up from its subdued dream-state, but Excepter's woozy rainbow brightens on "Og", mixing a loping beat, melodic synth waves, and chilled vocals into an oddly catchy New Age jam.
That may sound like a bit of a niche pleasure, and ultimately Presidence stands closest in Excepter's oeuvre to 2007's Streams (the aforementioned double-disc of podcast mixes), both best suited for the converted. This is, as the band calls it, "long distance music"-- sounds that take a while to absorb, and work better out on the horizon rather than up in your face. But while Presidence may keep its distance, it's never hard to enter, and individual pieces are as intriguing by themselves as they are in the album's wide-open context. In that sense, maybe every Excepter album should be called Streams-- the band's vision channels varied sounds and ideas into something worth wading through.
