Let’s pick a few descriptors out of a hat here, just to match what’s going on with this disc…deconstructionist, anarchic, proto-avant-garde, experimental. Or, more to the point, the sound of a busload of jazz musicians driving off a cliff. On fire. Robert Pepper of the noise/experimental collective PAS gathers a small crew of like-minded adventurers and assails jazz structure on Two. By “assails” I mean “clubs it to within an inch of its life with wild abandon.” Let me say right off the bat that this isn’t for everyone. Bring your high tolerance for improvisation, load yourself a bag full of “Huh?” and give it a try. In places this crew almost adheres to a listenable structure, as with the opener, “Swift Time DNA” and the early stages of “Flower Cacophony” before it gets torn to anti-music shreds, but for the most part it’s about jamming wildly around the concept. There’s humor at work here, buried under the multiple-car-crash sensibility. Pepper and his cohorts are playing with ideas of jazz’s free-ness, the sense that often informs the artform that no one’s really steering the ship, that the sound is just veering wildly of its own accord and will find its way back sooner or later. At the root, though, there’s some sort of mad intelligent design at work. That is, if you can stand it long enough to try to find it. This will not be easy.

Find it at CD Universe.