Artist The Desert Fathers

Seeing laptops onstage at all manner of shows has almost become a fact of life, yet—just by nature—they're not the first thing anyone would expect to hear mixed into improvised music. Californian trumpet player Jeff Kaiser and his Madison-based partner in tweakery, Gregory Taylor, summon eerie flocks of quarter-tones and abstract yet strangely well-controlled electronic manipulation under the name The Desert Fathers. As abstract as their drones and crackles sound, the two half-hour tracks on the 2007 album Coptic Icons give the sense of a mysterious instinct at work. In a single track, it can evoke a disorienting sound-collage spiral and an electronically dissolved take on Terry Riley's early breakthroughs.

Updated 11/02/2009