Once upon a time, there was a book, and that book was called The Mouse and His Child, by Russell Hoban. There are a pair of clockwork mice, a father and son, and the son longs, desperately, for a loving family life with the marmish elephant and the ball-balancing seal, in the magical doll house across the counter. They’re purchased by a family and broken by the cat; they are picked up and repaired by a tramp, who releases them into their adventure. There’s a murderous rat who uses wind-up toys for slave-labor, and a prophesying frog. And then there’s The Caws of Art, a philosophical experimental-theater troupe currently producing a play called The Last Visible Dog. It’s based on the label on an old can of Bonzo Dog Food, in which a dog looks wistfully at a can of Bonzo Dog Food, whose label has a picture of a dog looking wistfully at a can of Bonzo Dog Food, whose label has a picture, and on and on and on. The troupe’s spiritual leader, C. Serpentina, thinks it his crowning achievement. What doesn’t it mean?, he says, It just goes on and on, can mean anything and everything, depending on who you are and what your last visible dog is.

And on and on. From a vantage atop the highest hill in Indievania, one may lay eyes over hill and dale, past ocean and mountain, searching out the little pockets of unfettered creativity in the most unexpected places, marked by great glowing beacons limning the horizon. You’ve got beatific utopians droning to the big sky in New Zealand; crusty, beardy young skronk-hippies and their Queens loft parties; Finland’s ever-growing population of pixies and wood-nymphs; those noise-brats in Michigan and their quaint little cassette tapes. And then there’s Providence, RI, home not only to End-times shred-gods Lightning Bolt, but also a humble little out-label called Last Visible Dog. Equal parts traditional record label and way station and distribution hub for obscure little CD-R makers like PseudoArcana, Secret Eye, and Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, it was founded in Lincoln, NE in 1996, originally to release the works of label-head Chris Moon and his band MCMS (the Midwest Center for Mass Spectrometry). At the time, LVD made its name releasing hand-crafted limited-editions by the likes of Birchville Cat Motel (C-Psi-P proprietor Campbell Kneale), New Weird Minneapolis quartet Entrance, and early records by the now-famed Jeweled Antler Collective. After MCMS’s seeming dissolution—the label released a career retrospective in 2004—Moon began to focus on proper, manufactured releases, with lovely covers and lovelier music.

On their adventures through label-dom, these little upstarts, these plucky little underdogs, must band together in some sort of united front, an aesthetic epoxy binding the logs on the idyllic, vine-covered cabin next to the lake that… um… sorry, I was miles away; not because I’m a horrible drunk (though I am), but because LVD focuses mainly on a certain brand of drone-und-drang, a more textured, dynamic, and dramatic form of drone music, taking Tony Conrad and his Theater of Eternal Music (rather than La Monte Young) as a starting point and touchstone, and revolving around a set of artists who are bringing a new urgency to the music without sacrificing its vaunted hypnotic qualities. The front-and-center star (in my eyes anyway) is Campbell Kneale; as Birchville Cat Motel (his song and album titles are also all composed largely of random word combinations), he unspools lengthy ribbons of texture and noise, largely with samplers, guitars, and the occasional violin. His 2004 album Beautiful Speck Trumph remains perhaps the label’s greatest single release—a searing, brain-melting two-and-a-half hours of cloud-skimming highs. It’s not all drone—Japan’s LSD March may bring some of the same tension-building methods to the table, but their focus is on an eerie sort of low-key, guitar-driven, folk-doom-metal hybrid. But what other label would release a three-disc set of fried circuits, empty samplers, and ghostly guitars by Finland’s Uton (Jani Hirvonen); occasionally the instruments will drop out, and it sounds like he’s playing the very weather. Three-disc sounds weak? How about their recent six-disc compilation—31 different artists, seven-and-a-half hours—The Invisible Pyramid: Elegy. It’s a glorious collection, that feels a bit like a summation, a best-of-so-far (though all of the material was recorded specifically for this)—not a dog among them, mostly, with specifically good contributions from BCM and Uton, as well as Philadelphia shredders Bardo Pond, psychey-concrete madness from Ashtray Navigations, and a dead-quiet-to-horrifically loud sea of sound from My Cat Is an Alien.