’ev and David Jackman of Organum both have large legacies in the world of noisy, post-industrial avant-garde music, occupying places in the pantheon along with Coil, Nurse with Wound, and Current 93. Their collaboration is a momentous event, and it should be met with the slobbering anticipation (coupled with pillow-gnawing anxiety) that would herald a split Radiohead/Yo La Tengo album. But since the fan bases for these artists differ by, say, a couple of million people, Tocsin –6 thru +2 hit the streets with relatively little fanfare.

Luckily there’s still a chance to spread the news. With some word of mouth, maybe Organum can get that Saturday Night Live appearance he surely covets. And Z’ev can summon metallic swarms for sold-out crowds at the Meadowlands.

Let the campaign begin, because Tocsin –6 thru +2 deserves that kind of attention. The album comes from a recording session conducted by Jackman and Z’ev in London in 2004. They tinkered around with a grand piano and a steel instrument hand-built by Z’ev in 1989. The artists then flew home with the seven hours of recordings and, over the course of several months, whittled the bulk into this 50-minute album. But those 50 minutes are packed with seven hours worth of sound and ideas. During the editing process, Z’ev and Organum mixed, spliced, and layered the surviving sound so that every track sounds deep and rich.

Z’ev crafted seven pieces for the album: “Tocsin –6” through “Tocsin 0.” His contributions bury the piano under drifting sheets of scrap yard noise. The tracks are powerful and dense, and as the sheets of noise shift, the listener gets glimpses into the staggering depth of his music. The process is akin to flying over a cloudbank. Through the oval window, one sees a lumpy, opaque layer of white. The surreal shapes and contours of the clouds entice the eye, but when a gap opens up between them, and the rippling blue sea shines thousands of feet below, the viewer is suddenly struck by the size and scale of nature’s efforts.

But that metaphor needs a bit of revising, because Z’ev’s world sounds damn menacing. So we’re swooping madly over dark clouds pregnant with hail and pulsing with lightning. The turbulence punches your stomach, and your nausea only increases when you peek through the clouds and see an unending void of darkness below. At about four minutes on average, Z’ev’s pieces compose one dark sound world, segmented by the watery-eyed blinks of the viewer at the window.

Jackman rounds out the album with two long pieces, “Tocsin 1” and “Tocsin 2.” In them, the piano plays a much more prominent role, while the steel buzzes are relegated to intermittent background drones. “1” provides some much needed relief after the overwhelming music of Z’ev. The track is full of open space, with the piano tinkling beautifully in the foreground. Since Z’ev’s tracks were saturated with sound, the relative sparseness of Organum’s tracks is quite welcome. But these are not solo piano recitals. In “Tocsin 2” in particular, Organum coaxes a subtle world of swirling noise from the steel instrument, so that the piano sounds as if it is being played in a wind tunnel.

Though both artists approach the material differently, the album still sounds like the work of one group (admittedly a group with very diverse interests) because of the collaborative nature of the original recordings.

So let the media blitz begin. I expect to see the elusive Jackman on the cover of next month’s Rolling Stone, pushing the Britney Spears headlines to the far margins of the page. And I can’t wait to read Z’ev’s music picks on Amazon.com.