OYC25

If you're not already familiar with O Yuki Conjugate (and sadly, chances are very good that you aren't), then it will be hard to prepare you for what you'll hear the first time you encounter them. Not because there's anything intense or overwhelming about the experience — exactly the contrary, in fact. It's just that, even though their influences are easy enough to spot, the music they make manages to be both deeply indebted to those influences and at the same time completely unique and ultimately rather hard to describe. For this 25-year reunion album, recorded in 2007 (their first performance was in 1982 at a pub in Nottingham, England, to an audience consisting of six humans and one dog), the band created five untitled tracks. On them you'll hear sounds that evoke Bill Laswell's approach to ambient groovemongering (notice the fourth track's throbbing beat and nearly subliminal chord progression) and the faux-exoticism of Jon Hassell (listen to the surging chord patterns on the third track) along with pointillistic glitch sculptures (the microscopically scattershot fifth track) and spacious, gorgeous abstract sound constructs (the quietly ravishing second track). Too often, what gets billed and sold as "ambient" music is just simplistic or softheadedly mystical; O Yuki Conjugate's music is neither, and yet it is deeply, sweet-naturedly pleasant and undemanding despite its complexity.