It is a sign of the abjectly sheltered rock life I live that the thing that drew my attention to Rachel's was the back of one of their albums, turned toward me, with a list of seventeen participating musicians on it. "Imagine!", I said breathlessly to myself. "Seventeen musicians playing on the same album! Is there any precedent for such a Herculean labor of logistics?" I was halfway to the register, my mouth still hanging open in disbelief, when the little voice in my head that sometimes, though not quite as often as I'd like, keeps me from doing especially idiotic things, pointed out that musical gatherings of this size were, if you count hundreds of years of classical music, some of it made by me during middle school, not entirely unheard of. But I bought the album anyway, because, well, what kind of reason not to buy an album is "band not bigger than an orchestra"?

And indeed, the second Rachel's album, Music for Egon Schiele, released earlier this year, is a paragon of focus. Composed as the live accompaniment to a drama/dance recital about a minor (i.e., not mentioned in my edition of Timetables of History) early twentieth-century Austrian artist, Music for Egon Schiele finds the ensemble reduced to Grimes, Fredrickson and cellist Wendy Doyle, who wind gracefully through a muted, eloquent and impeccably balanced minor-key suite, echoing period music without ever descending into strict academic literalness (which, given my low tolerance for twelve-tone, is probably fortunate). Sadly, though, all the nerve endings of my classical music receptors were sanded off many years ago, with the result that it takes some form of garrulous or ostentatious excess to make much of an impression on me any more, and this self-contained and stylistically straightforward soundtrack possesses neither. I listen to it, and I like it, but it makes no further impression on me.

Music for Egon Schiele's significance, however, extends beyond its own length, as its concentration and coherence is experience vividly evident to me in the utterly mesmerizing third Rachel's album, The Sea and the Bells. The band returns to Handwriting's structure, with bells, two drummers, bass, three cellos, two violins, an extra viola, musical saw, clarinet and trumpet joining the trio at different points, but this time the various instruments seem to me to all be playing in service of a common musical cause, marrying experimental impulses Handwriting merely hinted at to a solid classical sense of self now grounded firmly in the accomplishment of Egon Schiele, and to me this is where Rachel's finally tears itself free of the crowded genres against which the first two albums strained. Threads of atmospheric ambience and rock drive are woven around a solid string and piano core that moves beyond superficial reliance on rigid Nyman-esque pulsing, and begins to investigate some of Nyman's subtler tricks, like cycling polyrhythms and mid-phrase half-step modulations, while flirting with lithe, elusive melodies, the elements all fusing, for the first time, into a flowing whole, rather than politely taking turns. The drums on "Rhine & Courtesan" are half orchestral timpani, half rock kit; the creak of masts and stays in the middle of the song are context, not digression. The string septet on "The Voyage of Camille" sighs and swells like the breath of a living creature or the sea itself. Noble's vibes on "Tea Merchants" blend with Grimes' piano as if the piano has merely developed a split personality. Drums coalesce out of the fog of "Lloyd's Register" like they were there all along but we are only now able to make them out, and then proceed to lead the song into a jagged storm of percussive fury, which it emerges from reborn, gasping and amazed. Noble's guitar and recorder feedback on "With More Air Than Words" leads directly into the eerie tranquillity of "All Is Calm"'s humming cello, viola and oscillating piano. Chattering tape spectres torment the sawing, epic "Cypress Branches" like a scene out of a wordless radio-play of Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and swarm into the viola choir of "Sirens" like the very air is possessed, leaving "Night at Sea" tense and unearthly. "Letters at Home", finally free of spirits, is subdued but hopeful, distracted bells clinking around its edges like the sounds of someone collecting their effects in anticipation of a homecoming, and "To Rest Near To You"'s fireworks are the sounds of the last night, celebration tinged with equal parts wistfulness, impatience and regret. But "The Blue-Skinned Waltz" is choked, and "His Eyes" is guarded and introspective, and somehow I know, even before I get to the end of Noble's long, haunting poem in the exquisitely printed book, that this story, as all great sea tales seem to, has ended with a question, not a reunion, and an ellipsis that is not the curtain closing but irresolution hanging, suspended in the wind.

If an album of instrumental music that tells a story is too concrete for you, though, there's always Aube, Akifumi Nakajima's prolific one-man sound laboratory, more abstract music than which you will be hard-pressed to find. There is a trick you can play on Aube fans, actually, which I feel comfortable revealing to you because the likelihood of your meeting an Aube fan without assembling it yourself is statistically insignificant. The trick is this: you can invent a literally unlimited number of fictional Aube albums which you can claim to own and adore, driving the fan you'll never meet insane with envy. For each one, you need only to fill out the following form: "It's called (combine any two whole or partial words having to do with industry or math). It's a limited edition of (pick a number from 500 to 1500), on some label called (pick another word or two involving industry or esoteric superstitions) from (pick any country where public buildings have fluorescent lighting and climate control). Everything on it was made from only the sound of a (pick any object, no matter how innocuous or mute). It's deliriously difficult to listen to, and thus totally cool."

It's called Metal De Metal. It's a limited edition of 1000 or something (the exact figure eludes me because the sticker that said the number wouldn't stick to the dangerous metal case the disc comes in, which I've had to keep on a separate to-be-reviewed pile for the past month, to keep it from maiming other CDs), on some label called Manifold from Tennessee. Everything on it was made from only the sound of metal. It's deliriously difficult to listen to, and thus totally cool.

It's called Infinitely Orbit. It doesn't, for once, appear to be a limited edition at all, but it's on some label called Alchemy from Osaka. Everything on it was made from only the sound of a Roland SH-2 analog synthesizer (which, judging from the sound of things, is not a creature protected under the Geneva Conventions). It's deliriously difficult to listen to, and thus totally cool.

You might think that a disc billed as a collaboration (whoops, forgot: It's called Maschinenwerk. It's a limited edition of 1000, on some label called Charnel Music from San Francisco. Everything on it was made from only the sound of Cock E.S.P. music, whatever that is. It's deliriously, etc.) would be a less debilitating way to experience Aube. This might have been true if it was an Aube album that Cock E.S.P. remixed, but it's the other way around, and we've already firmly established that Aube can construct the sound of your existence being very meticulously shredded out of any source material at all. I don't know what Cock E.S.P.'s "original sound source" sounded like before Aube got to it, and it's no more sensible to speculate than it is to try to eat sausages while watching Babe. "The Voice of Allergy" is almost pure white noise, "Autoburn" is like getting run over by German automobiles while being gently flayed, "Tour de Trance" is like getting run over by German subway trains while on the acid trip so bad that you give up drugs afterwards, and "Spacedub" is like getting run over by an asteroid belt while fleeing from a supernova. If the possibility of contracting a migraine headache so powerful that you forget your own name seems like excessive risk to run to find out whether you would like an Aube record, then I suspect reading about it will have to suffice.

Lest you misconstrue anything I said above, I like Aube records a lot. I have six of them, now, and I play them as bedtime music, I play them at work, I play them while vacuuming, I play them while watching a bad Monday Night Football game with the sound off and reading Umberto Eco novels, and I even play them just to listen to. There's no escaping the fact that if you must draw a line anywhere between "noise" and "music", Aube will sharing a category with sounds that, in any other phase of your life, foreshadow expensive mechanic bills or prolonged hospital stays, but I don't have a problem with that. Sometimes I want to listen to music, and sometimes I want to listen to the sound of my own brain hemorrhaging. I do live in an apartment building, but the walls are relatively thick, and the room I write in is insulated by my bedroom on one side, and the living room on the other, so I almost never get any complaints.