or all their talk of “freedom” and “new frontiers,” improvisers have created an arsenal of clichés unrivaled in any genre of music. The “experimental” aisle of your local record store is currently cluttered with countless records documenting yawn-inducing clang-and-bang sessions between uninspired musicians with one over-studied Derek Bailey record and a painful shortage of fresh ideas. Recent attempts to infuse improvisation with the new blood of abstract electronics have resulted in unsurprisingly mixed results - the logical result of grafting one increasingly formulaic musical breed to another. In too many cases, the marriage is that of the trite gestures that have come to mar spontaneous music with the faceless “glitch for glitch’s sake” aesthetic that is quickly deadening a young crop of somber laptop jockeys.


Fortunately, a record as promising as We Are Everyone In The Room is enough to restore flagging confidence in the field of electroacoustic improvisation. The music bristles with the tension between familiarity and divergence that only an ideal pairing of artists can produce. Icelandic Powerbook trio Stilluppsteypa has spent the past ten years carefully sculpting the sort of wintry soundscapes that invite comparison to the barren topography of their homeland. Their music glows with the aural equivalent of sunlight reflecting on a thin pool of ice and pulses with microscopic detail, all the while possessing a sharp absurdist sense of humor. Chicago laptop improvisers TV Pow merge the same irreverent humor with grittier electronic landscapes characterized by sharp granular spikes and splashes of field recordings. We Are Everyone In The Room documents the first exchanges by these groups as recorded on their 2000 tour of the United States. The results are nothing short of striking.


“Michigan Impossible” introduces the album with an astounding fourteen-minute encapsulation of the Stilluppsteypa/TV Pow merger’s open ears and sharp reflexes. A minimal static pulse hovers gently above filtered scraping and high-end pops, all the while gradually giving way to an undercurrent of resonant drones. Birdsong squeals enter the mix, followed shortly by the sound of a swelling wind. The combined effect is surreal and disquieting - the sounds of a dense rainforest sprouted atop a glacier, the unnatural hybrid of the organic and the artificial. The texture folds back into sparse hisses and rattles before being sharply broken by disorienting field recordings. The sampled shouts of a taxi driver, a darkly humorous fit of hysterical laughter, and a looped alarm clock skewered by blistering bursts of digital feedback create an imaginary landscape as intriguing as it is improbable. A final shiver of static abuts an uneasy silence - the track ends but the air remains charged.


The uprooted narrative sense of the first track pervades the remaining pieces, as does the carefully selected interweaving of ray gun shimmers and slow shifting drones. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of We Are Everyone In The Room is its expert pacing and careful manipulations of density. Large laptop ensembles tend to get gabby and anxiously stuff every silence with an unnecessary squiggle or careless blip. The music here, by contrast, is unnervingly spare and restrained throughout - atmospheres and suspense are built with increases in sonic depth and activity, never volume. Consequently, obvious climaxes are subverted and the listener is left with an endlessly surprising string of toppled expectations. In the wrong hands, such devices can lead to mere frustration or annoyance; in the hands of Stilluppsteypa and TV Pow, the result is a call to attention, an order to focus on minutiae and the ever-changing moment. Fear not, for all is not oppressive detail management and sober gray texture mongering; the aforementioned sense of humor remains present throughout. Amidst all the glacial metaphor and brow-furrowing is the sort of perverse joy that gives the compositions titles such as “Where’s Your Asian Girlfriend?” or interrupts a deathly serious drone with a hilariously inappropriate throat-clearing sample. The brilliant cover art, featuring three half-cat half-man creatures crowded around what could be a flower or a microphone, says it all. Scrawled with unhinged abandon in stark black and white, the illustration is simultaneously comical and sinister - a skewed childlike presence in a cold and unforgiving landscape.


So is electroacoustic improvisation really doomed to an eternity of Mego-lite boredom? If this record is any indication, hope springs eternal. Accessible yet austere and uncompromising without being unapproachable, this first offering from the combined forces of Stilluppsteypa and TV Pow makes good on the creative promise set forth by both free improvisation and laptop technology. We Are Everyone In The Room is a masterwork in the catalog of both ensembles and a must-have for anyone who still believes in the future of avant-garde music.