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There’s a reason why it’s called “incidental music”.

However much composers would love their work to stand on its own — to be “absolute” — film scores are always subserviant to the film. In some case, the restraints of a cue, let alone fast turn-around times, give composers little room to flesh out ideas.

Wayne Horvitz recognizes this fact.

Beautiful though the pieces on Horvitz’s collection Film Music 1998-2001 may be, they can’t escape the sense there’s something else determining their course.

Film Music 1998-2001, Horvitz’s first release on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, collects six different scores, five of which are jumbled amongst each other, the fifth presented as a suite.

Unlike Zorn’s own Film Works series which present the scores as complete works, Horvitz’s collection attempts to downplay the incidental nature of the music.

At first, it doesn’t succeed. Had Horvitz grouped the scores together, it would have been evident the Seattle-based improviser took wildly different approaches to each project.

Horvitz’s music for an untitled film by Gus Van Sant goes for found sounds, whereas Design and Deconstruction, written for the Experience Music Project, feels more like a lost President session with a DJ. A set of demos, on the other hand, clearly show an influence of his enigmatic 4+1 Ensemble.

His scores for Bellagio and Chihuly Over Venice explore a wide terrain of styles, but even their combined unifying power doesn’t mask the fact there are six autonomous works being passed off as two.

After a few listens, the picture changes. Film Music 1998-2001 sounds more like a Naked City album minus the manic bi-polar cycles.

A few more listens, and it becomes clear: the music is already incidental; why not program it in such a way that pieces of those distinct works form the score of an imaginary film in the listeners head?

It’s also admirable to hear Horvitz’s wildly divergent compositional styles on one disc, like having Zony Mash, Pigpen and 4+1 Ensemble switching off between tracks.

Thankfully, Horvitz sees fit not to mix up the most classically-minded score, simply titled Music Conceived for Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus, with the rest of the album. Though evidently not used in film, the work was premeried as a suite by the Seattle Chamber Players.

It may be difficult to sit through Film Music 1998-2001 and buy the idea that it’s an album onto itself, but think of it as a film score to a film not yet made, and it’s hard to hear it any other way.

I think I like this album for all the reasons I’m not supposed to.

According to hip-hop experts and jazz afficiondos, the “vs” in Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp is supposed to mean something.

It’s supposed to mean that the Antipop Consortium and Shipp are getting up and all over each other’s shit. It’s supposed to mean tension, conflict, a fight.

Instead, Antipop and Matthew Shipp pretty much give and take.

They’re collaborating instead of throwing down, respecting each other’s space instead of fucking things up.

And by most accounts, that’s what’s disappointing.

For a listener who doesn’t know any better — that is, anyone who is neither a hip-hop expert nor a jazz afficiondo; that is, me — it doesn’t really mean much.

If anything, someone who isn’t into neither hip-hop nor jazz (yup, that would be me again) may actually find Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp appealing.

Sure — on close examination, the album does have its share of flaws.

Shipp often sounds like an after-thought when he bumps heads with the rigidity of a hip-hop beat. Drum machines can’t swing, after all.

“Staph” and “A Knot In Your Bop” are pretty much Antipop’s show, with Shipp pounding away in the background.

The pianist’s finest moments happen when Antipop get out of the way — the suitable marriage of heavy chords and heavy beats on “Staph”, the eerie repeated motif of “SVP”, the supercharged be-bop of “Free Hop”.

To their credit, Antipop employs Shipp’s sense of harmony in appropriate ways. An off-kilter piano sample nicely punctuates “Slow Horn”. Shipp and his band weave themselves wonderfully on “Monstro City”, while “Real Is Surreal” is a compelling rhythmic collage.

But despite some awkwardness and its lack of tension, Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp is still a decent album. It’s refreshing to hear hip-hop that doesn’t depend on studio clichés, and it’s nice to hear a jazz free from a slavish devotion to bop and swing.

The album is unshackled by jazz’s usual staidness and hip-hop’s narrow field of content.

Antipop and Shipp may not quite achieve a paradigm shift for their respective genres, but they have produced an enjoyable 40 minutes of listening.

Calling jazz “America’s classical music” isn’t too far off. There’s a lot of work that goes into studying and appreciating European art music, and jazz’s storied history requires a similar kind of formal academics.

Which rather excludes listeners who have only so much attention span to devote to a three-minute rock song. That is, I can dig jazz as an idea, but it’s not going to dent my CD shelf space the way rock music does.

Enter the Bad Plus.

Sure, the wild improvisation and the obvious swing mark the band’s debut These Are the Vistas as a jazz album, but there’s something in the Bad Plus’ performances to make it more akin to a rock album.

The Bad Plus calls itself the loudest piano trio in the world, which is something of a misnomer. Volume is only a symptom of the troupe’s fire.

First off, the Bad Plus doesn’t exclusively play be-bop — some of the band’s pieces are structured more like songs.

The album’s openers, “Big Eater” and “Keep the Bugs Off Your Glass and the Bears Off Your Ass”, actually feel like they have choruses and middle eights.

“Everywhere You Turn” doesn’t even have much in the way of improvisation — just one musical idea starting quietly, gradually increasing in intensity, exploding to a peak, then dying down.

The slow-burning “Guilty” and the angular “Boo-Wah” show the Bad Plus can deliver a relatively conventional form of jazz, but the Bad Plus works best when they’re stretching those boundaries.

Nowhere is that ability more apparent than on the group’s choice of covers.

A jazz piano cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” looks like a bad opportunity for some real schmaltz on paper, but the Bad Plus keys into the viscera which made the original song a generational rallying cry.

At the same time, they really fuck up the harmonies behind Kurt Cobain’s seminal work — and in a very good way.

Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” becomes a foundation for some incredible rhythmic liberties, while Aphex Twin’s “Flim” shows programmed beats can sound human under the right arms.

These Are the Vistas closes with the epic “Silence Is the Question”, a piece not afraid to incorporate grandoise chords from Romantic era classical music.

Despite the Bad Plus’ hybrid of pop structure and improvisational skill, the trio really pound its instruments like rock musicians. Ethan Iverson isn’t the cleanest pianist around, nor should he be. Drummer David King, though, really knows his kit.

As such, These Are the Vistas shouldn’t feel too out-of-place in a CD collection sparse on jazz.

In the past, mono has been pretty dependable when it came to crafting hulking works out of minimal but melodic material.

For the most part, the band’s second album, One Step More and You Die, offers everything as before — extreme volumes, beautiful melodies, noisy harmonies.

But the album’s center piece, “com (?)”, doesn’t strike as deeply as such previous epics as “Karelia” or “The Kidnapper Bell”. The track doesn’t develop as organically, and by the end, it actually gets stuck. Maybe strumming only one chord for 16 minutes was a bad idea.

Since the song occupies a good third of the album’s entire 55-minute length, it leaves a lasting impression.

After that, the remaining tracks don’t seem to hazard the same kind of extremes. That doesn’t stop them from being beautiful in their own right.

“a speeding car” does a marvelous job of drawing inward before unleashing the full band. “loco tracks” actually features what could best be described as a “chorus” — and a really nice one at that.

The songs which work the most are the ones which remain introspective. “sabbath” would probably sound lovely if arranged for classical guitars.

“mopish moring, halation whisper” is actually the most interesting track on the album. By making it sound like a vintage vinyl recording, mono transforms its heavily-processed guitars into a small chamber orchestra. (At least, I think those are guitars.)

“halo” brings One Step More and You Die back closer to the missed intensity of “com (?)”, but then the album ends with a backmasked version of its introduction (“giant me on the other side”, which is based on “where am i”).

As such, it feels as if the album gets cut off before it has a chance to really hit its mark.

This time around, mono gets help from cellist Udai Shika, plus an occassional piano and glockenspiel. Those touches sweeten the general dark tone of the music.

mono still retain its tack for melody and texture, but their sense of structure takes a bit of a hit. Other reviewers have criticized the band’s previous work for showing too much of an influence by Mogwai.

It may be true that One Step More and You Die finds the band discovering its own voice, but the album isn’t as air-tight as what’s come before.

However much I love Bill Frisell, there are times I wish his music weren’t so translucent. Lush and rustic though his writing may be, there’s always a sense that a truck could be driven through the spaces between his ringing notes.

Fanzine and alt-rock publications far and wide have gone to great lengths attaching adjectives to the music of Dirty Three, lots of ink and column inches devoted to coming up with synonyms for the word “haunting”.

And despite a personal wish not to be a lemming, this review cannot do otherwise. But at least I’ll be nerd enough to say Dirty Three provides me with the whatever it is I’ve been looking for in Bill Frisell.

And that is this: introspection that threatens to explode.

Let me disclaim right away She Has No Strings Apollo is the second album by Dirty Three to which I’ve listened — a co-worker handed me a copy of Whatever You Love You Are in the office years ago and instructed me to listen to it right then and there. I did, that once, liked it, but didn’t feel compelled to get my own copy.

From what I remember of that initial exposure, She Has No Strings Apollo pretty much has the same elements as Whatever You Love You Are — a melancholy violin, a haunting guitar and a restrained drummer.

Dirty Three’s songs may stretch to six or eight minutes long, but the way the trio builds to a climax doesn’t seem long-winded — they need that length of time to arrive at where they’re going.

This time around, Dirty Three has fleshed out its sound. “Long Way to Go With No Punch” is propelled not by a violin but by a piano. And that’s a second violin part on “No Stranger Than That”, isn’t it?

Violinist Warren Ellis makes his instrument sing. That is to say it would be tough to find a singer who could draw out the kind of emotion from an instrument the way Ellis does his.

And while Ellis, guitarist Mick Turner and drummer Jim White may not be jazz improvisers in the most conversative sense, there’s definitely a dynamic between all three players to match the fire of a be-bop set.

She Has No Strings Apollo is a nice starting point to discover Dirty Three. Here’s instrumental rock as basic as it is expressive.

Between Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising and boycotts against the Dixie Chicks, it’s easy to overlook the fact people outside of the U.S. have opinions on 9/11 and the War on Terrorism.

You won’t find that couplet on a Toby Keith single, nor even a Sleater-Kinney song.

The author of the lyric is Angelina Esparza, a Los Angeles-based, half-Japanese, half-Latina singer, and she delivers those words on Shinsou ~The Message at the Depth~, an album written and recorded by Japanese artist DJ Krush.

Despite working with some of hip-hop’s finest talents, Krush usually expresses himself wordlessly, allowing his timbres and textures to do the speaking.

On 2001’s Zen, Krush’s music was contemplatitive, soothing without being sentimental, minimal without being repetitve.

Shinsou, by contrast, is agitated.

From the start, “Trihedron”‘s stuttering beats and gravel-rough effects show the events since September 2001 have unsettled Krush.

And it doesn’t let up. On “Toki no Tabiji”, Japanese rapper INDEN raps frantically over synthetic effects and beats reminiscent of dropping bombs.

“Sanity Requiem” is an ironic title — the track feels neither “sane”, nor restful. In other words, the world’s done gone crazy. Similarly, “The Blackhole” layers dischordant harmonies and blurry effects over nervous rhythms. That title isn’t ironic.

While Steve Earle crunched a lot of people’s underwear singing in the perspective of John Walker Lindh, Anticon offers up “Song for John Walker”, which takes a more scattered aim against American suburbia in general.

But the most sobering perspective on the album is that of Esparza. Replicating ACO’s earlier role as Krush’s sweet-voiced foil, Esparza delivers the most bitter words of the album on “Aletheuo (truthspeaking)”, a video of which is included on the CD.

“The institution you attend/And all the clones that you befriend/Just seem to finalize your end.”

Shinsou does end on cautiously optimistic note with the deeply reggae “What About Tomorrow”. Abijah implores “No more bombing No more shooting Let the children be”.

Krush’s collaborators on Shinsou may not attract the kind of literary criticism lorded on the likes of Springsteen or Earle, but in reality, they’re not incredibly central to Krush’s mode of expression.

In the end, it’s the music that speaks volumes for the DJ, and given its aggressive and unsettling tone, Shinshou says more than enough.

It’s been said before, and the comparrison can’t be avoided — downy sounds a lot like Radiohead.

downy’s name is pretty indicative of its music. There’s definitely a warmth to the band’s songs, an intimacy in the way singer Aoki Robin murmurs his lyrics, even in the way the guitars intertwine.

But the music is also incredibly dark. “Tortured” is an adjective that’s been flung around to describe the band, and it’s true. They’re not named “uppity” for a reason.

If Radiohead recorded Kid A and Amnesiac with a more minimalistic tack — as in repetitive minimalist — and used distortion as its only effects processor, it would probably sound a lot like downy’s second untitled album.

But the murky tenor of Aoki brings the Japanese quintet closer to another big European band — Sigur Ros. (So does the band’s marvelous habit of not titling its albums. At least downy keeps song titles.)

It’s easy to forget at first Aoki is Japanese — he apes Thom Yorke just as blatantly as Coldplay’s Chris Martin. But with his voice so indescript in the mix, it doesn’t matter what language he’s singing.

He could be singing in Hopelandish for all a listener can tell.

It’s all in the delivery. Aoki haltingly delivers his words syllable by syllable, as if finding it difficult to bring out what’s making his mind and heart tick.

Coupled with his bandmates repetitive arrangements,

downy produces not just music, but a form of hypnosis.

At first, it’s easy to tune out, to dismiss it as all texture and no development.

But allow the hypnosis to work, and there’s a lot of satisfaction to be found in the texture.

There isn’t really much point in singling out individual moments on the album as particularly stunning — the entire disc feels like a single-flowing work. Watch out for “Kuroi Ame”, though — just when you think the track is about to implode, Robin and his guitarist/brother Aoki Hiroshi remind you otherwise.

Of course, name dropping Radiohead is convenient, but like most comparrisons between Japanese and Western artists, inaccurate. It’s probably more meaningful to mention Walrus, mono or Luminous Orange — all bands crafting full, atmospheric songs out of seemingly complex and lean material.

downy’s second album does the same, and the result is entrancing.

Never underestimate the power of sequencing.

That is, never underestimate the power of the order of an album’s track list.

Compact disc technology has long since allowed a listener to determine which tracks to play on a CD, something the needle of a record player or the fast forward/rewind buttons of cassette player could never accomplish.

That doesn’t mean artists are remiss in their responsibility to do right by their albums and come up with a decent sequence.

Condor44 didn’t learn that lesson on its first album, 00203. Despite some mature, intelligent songwriting, 00203 fell apart as an album.

The Japanese trio stacked all its fast-tempo songs at the start of the album, then finished the second half with slow, long-winded psychedelia. The two differing aesthetics of Condor44’s songs complemented each other, but by segregating them, the band ultimately weakened both.

Luckily, Condor44’s follow-up, db, suffers from no such mistake.

The same kind of intelligent songwriting packs this second album — melodically simple, harmonically complex, and rhythmically unpredictable.

But this time, the band evenly distributes its material.

The ends of the album are anchored with fast songs, leaving the middle part with more spacious songs. In other words, they built an arc. (Or a valley, if you prefer.)

“db” alternates between the sweet verses of Ishida Chikako and a boisterous chorus delivered by Sasaki Hirofumi. “condortime” may tick at a standard four-quarter time, but the drum’s unexpected stops accent odd parts of the beat.

“Renge” wades in reverb, building to an ethereal climax, whereas “bo-go.09” generally sticks to a sparse arrangements — acoustic guitar, voice and light percussion.

“Ranka” gives the album a trip-hop turn, while “visionary town” ramps the volume — but not the tempo — back up.

Like Luminous Orange and mono, Condor44 doesn’t use very many power chords. Sasaki likes his harmonies thick and lush, slightly dischordant but never too off-kilter.

db realizes the potential 00203 first hinted, and it succeeds in presenting Condor44’s broad sound in the best possible light.