The most comforting observation I've made on this subject, recently, comes from reading, in quick succession, short-story collections by Jim Shepard and Lucius Shepard, two writers who are not, as far as I'm aware, despite their adjacencies on library shelves and in my reading schedule, related in any way. Jim Shepard teaches at Williams College, and writes, at three or four year intervals, quiet, tense, writerly novels, with a variety in style and theme that, I presume, comes in large part from a life spent reading other people's books. Lucius is a science-fiction writer (at least nominally, though often the level of scientific involvement is low enough for the style to count as magic realism), with an adventurer's pedigree more in the mold of Ernest Hemingway's, if he'd spent more time in Guatemala. There are a number of ways in which they could be considered opposites, but the one that struck me has to do with the way their stories tend to end. As Lucius acknowledges, in a self-referential moment toward the end of "A Spanish Lesson", the story that concludes his collection The Jaguar Hunter, his stories tend to continue past their climaxes, in search of a moral, as if what happens is less consequential than the significance you assign to it. Jim's stories, on the other hand, often actually end before their climaxes, as if the goal of fiction is to construct the possibilities, not to choose between them. The difference between these two strategies, in short stories, is only a matter of a few paragraphs, but extend it to longer works and you have the seeds of the difference between a fiction like The Lord of the Rings, one of the classic examples of writing past the climax (Tolkien actually writes past two climaxes, and then his son appends a dozen volumes of analysis and marginalia, to make sure no aspect is left to implication), and one like the film Hurricane Streets (a grim urban romance which I won't spoil for you, except to say that its most devastating confrontation is not shown), which represent, I think, along at least one axis, polar artistic opposites. The thought I suddenly have, then, is that the only continuums of artistic expression I feel like I really understand are the ones that stretch between two seemingly contradictory extremes, both of which I nonetheless adore. If your taste in a form has only one pole, all its endeavors will slip away from it, ticking past hashmarks of declining desirability, in a perverse migration that will inevitably seem to you, at its core, to be insane. If stories, in your world, must have morals, than the ones that stop short are cowardly and fatally flawed, and you will spend much of your reading life annoyed and dissatisfied, or else you will gradually stop reading altogether. Once you find two extremes to embrace, though, you supply a logic for every point in the infinity between them. And so, in music, this idea reassures me, pure melody and pure noise are the poles to which the million shades of their intersections owe their existences, and not only is it possible that I really do enjoy listening to industrial noise, the fact that I genuinely enjoy it is probably the chief source of whatever passes for broadmindedness in my musical tastes.

If this theory is correct, then Crawl Unit's 1996 album Vs. Silence is as appropriate theme music for this column as its title suggests. It is, I'm virtually certain, the most minimal, and least conventionally musical, CD I own. The rough brown paper that lines the jewel case has a bar code, the title, and the label insignia in the bottom corner of the back cover, a few faint lines of explanatory small print occupying about a square inch in the center of the front cover, and absolutely nothing on either inside surface. The CD itself has no printing on it at all, which means that the only way to tell whether it's upside-down or not is to peer at the manufacturing numbers along the center band. The noises produced by actually playing the disc, in keeping with the packaging, fight their battle with silence on remarkably even terms. Soft hums drift into the lower reaches of audibility and fall away again, shadowy rumbles effervesce faintly in the distance, metallic throbs pulse weakly, and the gaps between noises are as prominent as the sounds that demarcate them. The unplugged version of this album would be performed by slowly, patiently flexing the sustain pedal on a piano, and waiting for the changes in barometric pressure or small tectonic shifts to agitate the strings into audibility. I suspect that many people who think of themselves as music lovers will be of the opinion that this does not qualify as music, in precisely the same way that many people who love painting really mean Vermeer, and not Jackson Pollock. You could produce more rhythmic structure by running your dishwasher empty, more sonic energy by melting a candle onto a microphone, and more emotion by frowning at a cardboard cutout of Spock. Vs. Silence is more than an hour long, and I suspect most people's tolerance for near-subliminal whir is closer to twenty seconds, which in my experience is about as long as they'll go, once the tunnel has blocked out the station they had on, before switching the car radio off.

And, indeed, I don't listen to albums like this the same way I do XTC's English Settlement. To spend an hour immersed in coruscating sonic eddies, as opposed to just letting them play in the background while I do my taxes, I usually have to invent theories about what the sounds depict. Or perhaps it's the other way around, and the act of concentrating on these noises elicits the scenarios. Whichever direction causality runs, I've got two ideas for what Vs. Silence is a recording of. The first is that this is the sound of two spiral galaxies passing through each other. If Hollywood staged such a spectacle, it would be an orgiastic pyrotechnic cacophony, rather like a West Texas tornado filled with mylar confetti and magnesium, and then flung into an oil field lined with land-mines, because the grammar of blockbuster movies has cemented explosions to collisions so firmly that they might as well be a ligature (it's gotten to where I'm taken aback when somebody drops a wine glass and it doesn't level half the block). In reality, though, given the spaces between stars, the clash of galaxies would probably be eerily serene, less a matter of detonations and billiard-angles than of fields of astro-magnetic influence, slowly passing each other by, merging and then gradually disentangling themselves again, and occasionally grazing across each other with a brief crackle of interference.

The other thing this might be, it seems to me, is a transcript, in some wavelength that registers life-sparks like infrared shows heat, of the way a city full of people moves around me, spiritually as well as physically. While this album plays, I sit by the window in my study, which looks out onto a quiet cross-street, and as the music swells and recedes, I look for visible correlations. Sometimes a car passes as a noise arrives, or a couple walks by, along my fence, their streetlight shadows skittering through the boards of the fence and across my patio like a reverse zoetrope. But this is no news; I could hear the hiss of tires on the wet street, or the murmur of conversation and the taps of footfalls, even if I turned the record off. The more inspiring moments are the ones when a burst of noise is accompanied by nothing I can see, and I'm left to imagine the other ways another soul could have grazed my sphere of influence: somewhere someone is reading Gormenghast for the first time, and comes across the passage that makes them, too, think that this is what Goldman based The Princess Bride on; somewhere someone is flipping through cable channels and comes across LA Story, and lets the remote slip out of their hand onto a sofa cushion; somewhere someone shaves their head, or decides to bake cookies, or bangs a soccer injury on the end of a table. The music (and now it is music, not just noise) swirls and soars, every moan a token of shared experience with people I cannot see. This is, I'm painfully aware, maudlin, and perilously close to tawdry new-age mysticism, but the nights are full of attempts to reach out of our shells, and this noise is no more ridiculous a soundtrack for it than the breathless QVC testimonials of the last six people who just bought a set of army knives for which I can't imagine anybody but a serial killer having a use.

Packaging aside, Aqua Syndrome is the most surprising of what is now my eleven-album Aube collection. Akifumi's source material this time (on a limited edition of 1000, from Manifold Records) is water, and for once you can actually recognize the source in the final product. His usual trick of contorting every source into an ear-shredding howl is nowhere in evidence here, and while he makes plenty of sounds you won't trace to water, there is more than enough gurgling to prompt comparisons to more ambient material, like Future Sound of London's Lifeforms, which the overall atmosphere doesn't go out of its way to discourage. These pieces are sparer, using one water sound at a time, or two, where prior albums would layer several incarnations of their source, and there's even, for part of "Back Draft", a boomy two-note water-bass line that almost constitutes a groove. I still don't expect him to suddenly snap and start writing Riverdance rip-offs, but it's exciting to hear him testing his own stylistic boundaries.