I assume there's a handbook you're issued, when you're hired to write music reviews for a real media outlet, that explains the exact meanings and nuances of all the special terms you're expected to use. I should probably go get one of those jobs, only for a week, just to obtain a copy. Do they take it away again when you quit? No matter, I read fast and remember pretty well. Without that glossary, I find I'm often lost, and whenever I encounter a term I don't know, I automatically assume that it's a new way of describing Pavement, and thus something I should avoid. But after much study and triangulation, I think I have developed a functional understanding of two more subgenres. The first is "emo", whose name derives from a combination of the rhubarb-derived laxative "emodin", the skin-lotion descriptor "emollient", the archaic fee "emolument", and the local-music scene around Emory University, in Atlanta. Emo bands are thus relaxing, old-fashioned, and unmistakably Southern; the archetypical emo artist would be the Allman Brothers, if they were nearly too stoned to perform. (Several of you have already begun composing angry emails. I should mark the jokes in red.) Two real, if glib, heuristics for identifying an emo band are 1) if they sound like Buffalo Tom with a migraine, they might be emo, and 2) if anybody you know has heard of them, they're not. Some candidates I've written about are The Promise Ring, Christie Front Drive, Jimmy Eat World, the Gloria Record and Braid.

The cuddly, upbeat version of Don Caballero, arguably math rock in the same way that 10 Things I Hate About You is Taming of the Shrew, but evocative nonetheless, is Audio, the first album by the theater collective responsible for the apparently inexhaustible (New York, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas) show Tubes. The booklet expounds at some length on how integral the music is to the show, but after hearing a lot of non-rock-fans enthuse about it, I've come to believe that the music is actually little more than an expression of energy and enthusiasm, and sufficiently subservient to the three players' surreal, blue-headed stage antics that it doesn't really matter whether you pay it any closer attention. The constructed environment of Tubes is noisy, like in the constructed environment of a roller-coaster the scenery moves really fast, and it doesn't really matter whether you'd like that in isolation.

Somewhere I read a description of Japancakes that claimed the band performed hour-long sets consisting of only a single chord. Maybe they do, but sadly, this album isn't a recording of one. Perhaps these eleven instrumentals were each inspired by one chord, and they certainly all have mesmerizing qualities, but none of them are literally drones. Although the rhythm tracks are calmer and more patient than Don Caballero's, I don't think they're entirely unrelated; the rest of the instrumentation, however (and the credits list six full-time band-members and seven other players), invokes referents as various as Kraftwerk and Ry Cooder, wheezy synth runs twining around elegiac pedal-steel guitar, watery marimbas rippling under mournful violins. At least one song seems to be a thought-experiment aimed at deciding what Low would sound like with a rock drummer, and several seem to me like they could have been born out of a qualified dissatisfaction with how little of their rock background the members of Rachel's allow their playing to display. Parts have the pensive distraction of Mogwai or the Willard Grant Conspiracy, but a drowsy Mark Knopfler-esque melody almost always swoops through and galvanizes them into slow motion. What the "Japan" in the name signifies, I have no idea, unless there's a language in which "Japancakes" means "like This Mortal Coil transplanted to Abilene", or "like the American Music Club humanizing a Michael Nyman concerto", or "like techno for Luddites". I wanted to be tormented, but it would be perverse to resent an epic serenade just because you thought it was going to hurt.

Guitarist Jason Begin and drummer Ron Marschall, who are half of the Blue Ontario, were previously half of Christie Front Drive. Traces of CFD's anthemic claustrophobia are sporadically detectable, and Marschall's drumming, in particular, doesn't seem to me to have changed much to accommodate the new band's aesthetic, but the Blue Ontario are an order of magnitude more restrained. The vocals are delivered ethereally and often submerged in the mix, and the guitars shimmer as often as they howl. The two unretouched band songs here, the rumbling "Lost Astronaut" and the noisy and distended "Twenty Three", both remind me of Curious Ritual on a not-so-pop day, and if Japancakes are a This Mortal Coil for the American frontier, the Blue Ontario could be a version for the snow-locked northern towns, if not Toronto then at least Hüsker Dü's Minneapolis, after their anger has had a decade to dissipate into the brief summers.

Christie Front Drive's other guitarist, Eric Richter, headed in the opposite direction to find a name, but ends up with a strikingly similar sound. Most of the eleven tracks on this double album (and if I were me I'm sure I'd have ditched at least one and put the rest on a single disc) are densely atmospheric rock near-instrumentals. One of the new members must have brought along their Joy Division/New Order/Mike Oldfield collection, though, as dour synth-pop impulses manifest themselves in several places. "Return to Omma Dawn" is the explicit Oldfield homage, but "Ultra Nørsk" seems tenuously related to Spandau Ballet, "Hallucinus" reminds me of some Simple Minds instrumentals, "Exisis" isn't that far removed from the Future Sound of London, and I suspect "Arctikal", which is unnervingly Pink Floyd-ish at this slow pace, would sound like Jean Michel Jarre if it were faster (and to me the idea that Jean Michel Jarre is double-speed Pink Floyd is enough to validate an album by itself).

What I really thought Japancakes would sound like is "Sweet Medicine", the opening track on Underarms, an odd mail-order-only collection of disembodied instrumentals and miscellaneous outtakes from the Hope Blister's one real album, ...Smile's OK. For almost eight minutes, one breathy chord reverberates, and around it small noises click, whir and sigh, never seeming to threaten the drone. "Friday Afternoon" uses a few more tones, more like Brian Eno's Music for Airports. "Iota" is dimly rhythmic, using multi-tap delay to make percussion loops out of stray environmental noise. "Dagger Strings" and "Happiness Strings" are, unsurprisingly, the string sections from two of the album tracks, left to their own stately, legato devices. "White on White" is mostly ominous bass rumbles and angelic exhalations, somewhere between Aube and Enya. And "Sweet Medicine 2" is another thirteen minutes of the same enraptured chord. Measured in notes, or individual ideas, this record is short to the point of evanescence, but to me all the This Mortal Coil and Hope Blister songs have been stages in Ivo Watts-Russell's ongoing search for the elemental essence of the 4AD aesthetic, and these, with the "song" almost distilled completely out of them, suggest that he's almost there.

Dominic Appleton sang on four This Mortal Coil songs, including the timeless covers of Gene Clark's "Strength of Strings" and Chris Bell's "I Am the Cosmos". The rest of the time, he is the leader of Breathless, whose existence I somehow managed to avoid ever noticing until what I assume are reissues of their old albums began turning up in the bins here recently. The first three (The Glass Bead Game (1986), Three Times and Waving (1987) and Chasing Promises (1989)) are superb period-pieces in the mold of the Chameleons and the Comsat Angels, possibly as if those two bands had been combined and signed by 4AD. Blue Moon, the new Breathless album, and the first since 1994, is rather more given to spaced-out instrumental digressions than the Chameleons ever were, but I'm gradually learning to adapt my metabolism to its somnolent pace. As with Antarctica, I think it's only hard because there are rock songs hiding in the Bliss-Out fog, and they interfere with my concentration on the ebb and flow around them. If you can find the two-CD version of this album, though, the second CD is a bonus called Moonstone, which consists of two untitled tracks lasting a total of nearly fifty minutes, and this is the one I've been listening to without any effort or reservation. If these instrumentals bear any direct relation to the songs on Blue Moon itself, it eludes me. They sound like Appleton locked himself in a studio with the tape running and just wandered around it, coaxing one or two notes out of each instrument or wall and then leaving them ringing, feeding back or decomposing while he contemplated the next one. Compared to these, Tales From Topographic Oceans are limmericks. If these are pop songs, they're for whales. But I have an extremely high tolerance for interminable, evolutionary, ambient soundscapes. Maybe this is just the sound of Dominic Appleton poking around in a room, but my rooms don't do this when I prod them, and I wish they did.

After Pages From the Book, I considered never buying another Aube record. Regarded in retrospect, everything before then seems to lead to Akifumi Nakajima's cryptic deconstruction of a Bible, and his body of work thus seemed so complete, to me, that making more records, or listening to them, might somehow jeopardize his legacy, or my interpretation of it. But as ruefully as I may describe these records, I really do enjoy them. Nobody else I listen to has the requisite discipline to write biographies of substances and objects without anthropomorphizing them, to tell the story of a thing's own nature instead of the story of how we perceive and pity it. Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is no more documentary than anime; Fiorella Terenzi's "enhanced" transcriptions of radio-telescope data are hardly better than taxidermy misconstrued as puppetry. And if all the Aube albums I already have are now chapters in the build-up to Pages From the Book, to me, then the new albums are just as likely to be chapters pointing toward another revelation, and I'll want to be ready for it when it comes.

The companion reissue, Flush, reaches back even further for two tracks from a 1992 cassette, two from a 1993 seven-inch, and one more 1992 live performance. All five are made from the sound of water, which means that Akifumi's distinction between "source material" and manipulation is probably more obvious on these pieces than it is when he's working from medical apparatus or sheet metal. This isn't a surf-noise relaxation tape, it's the sound of parts of your consciousness collapsing under ocean pressure, or the earth fidgeting below all these seas and rivers. The water never sounds malicious, exactly, but it's clear that its power is so far beyond human scale that if it crushed us, with a sudden twitch, it would never notice. Some of these noises come from drops, but for the most part I take this to be the internal monologue not of water as separable units but of all the water on the planet, including the gallons that make up more than half of our bodies, collectively pondering its identity. Water, it turns out, is animated by passions every bit as ferocious as the ones that haunt glow-lamps. I suppose one could argue that this is a biographer's failing, that if the stories of water and glow-lamps both include deafening blasts of white-noise then the blasts don't belong to the subject at all. But I take it to be a tenet of Aube's records, not a limitation. Any object harbors serenity and apocalypse, and you haven't understood a thing until you've figured out how it voices both.

And if the similarities between Flare and Flush leave you needing to be convinced that Akifumi doesn't simply own a machine that turns any input into the noise of your brain being pulverized, all you have to do is juxtapose Flush with Ricochetentrance, another album made from the sound of water six or seven years later (released in 1999 on the multinational label Lunar, in a limited edition of 1000). As overwhelming and all-consuming as Flush was, Ricochetentrance is understated and reticent. Returning to water, after years spent studying other elements, Akifumi hears character traits he either overlooked the first time, or undervalued. If Flush sang of the crushing weight of water, and the way erosion tears grooves into the earth, this one is about oxygen content, and how no water is ever silent, no matter how still, and how subtle the distinction sometimes is between water and air. Noises fade in and out like fluctuating humidity. For once, the only physical precaution you need to take to get through this album without discomfort is to urinate before track four begins.

It's far too soon for the second Aube cycle to reach a conclusion, but four albums into it I have my first clue about the direction it might progress. Blood-Brain Barrier (on the French label Ytterbium) isn't the first electroencephalogram record (Evocation is the other one I have), nor the first to focus on the body the machine is monitoring, instead of the machine itself (Cardiac Strain was made from heartbeats), but still, humanity has been notably absent from Aube's records. A heartbeat is not a life, is not even much of a synecdoche for a life, nor are brain waves. I wonder, are people harder to grasp, or easier, than water and glow-lamps? We are more complex systems, but complexity doesn't always produce depth or texture; compare the private lives of a Lear Jet and a bicycle. Blood-Brain Barrier hints, I think for the first time, that Akifumi may be ready to confront us. Parts of this record are rhythmic, parts articulated almost like language. The macro-structure of these pieces is familiar, but the micro-structure is not. Playing air-guitar to it would still look like epilepsy, but you could impose measures on much of it, not because it's been composed but because people can't afford the same patience as oceans. If Akifumi listens to us, he'll hear less sustain, more beats. A hour is a moment, to water, but thousands of moments to us. We want music we can dance to because if we stand still we fear we're forfeiting critical pieces of our brief existences. You can't exactly dance to Aube, even this, unless you've learned to dance to the hum of your own blood circulating. But don't bet that you won't.

I've been known to play Aube records as background music, but a few brief experiments quickly convinced me that this is, by other people's standards, freakish. I think I choose background music not by how it sounds, but by whether I find it provocative or evocative. Anything I've already made up my mind about, no matter how abrasive or confrontational, can serve as ambience. It reminds me of something, without requiring my active involvement, and thus serves as my equivalent of the rotting apples the father keeps in his desk drawer in One True Thing, even though the precise point of those was to engage a physical sense, not a receptor of truth. I focus most effectively, as best I can tell, when I'm partly and consistently distracted. The distractions provide contrasts, and comparators of scale. Some comparators are more general-purpose than others; I don't attempt to do my most abstract philosophical reasoning while listening to Black 47 or Meat Loaf, for instance. The most malleable background record in my collection, which I reserve for the most demanding reveries, has for some time been Officium, ECM producer Manfred Eicher's first cross-breeding of Jan Garbarek's discreet, New-Agey saxophone improvisations with the Hilliard Ensemble's early-music choral arrangements. It is, as far as I'm concerned, utterly without literal sense, but steeped in reverence and an imperturbable faith in human nobility. It goes on and on, and never changes in any significant way. Mnemosyne, the two-CD sequel, is almost twice as long, so I like it before it even starts. The liner notes explain the other difference: on some of these pieces, based on fragments of scores, the singers are improvising too. Maybe this will be painfully apparent to you. I can't tell. Oh, that's not quite true; in the scored pieces all four vocal parts tend to be in motion at once, where in the improvised ones one singer will solo while the others execute a holding pattern. Garbarek backs off while a solo is unfolding, and then joins in with a counterpoint once he sees where it's going. I can tell, I just don't care. My relationship to Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble improvising around Peruvian folk-song fragments is identical to my relationship to Jan Garbarek improvising around a Hilliard Ensemble performance of Thomas Tallis or Hildegard von Bingen. The vocal parts are the ancient progenitors of the music I mean when I say music, and the saxophone is my mental superimposition of modern melodic order onto it. The meta-messages of this music, to me, are that all styles are concurrent, and that all songs are manifestations, equally, of the religious impulse, Don Caballero and Aube as surely as a church choir or the Ode to Joy. I may claim to be an atheist, but that should fool nobody. The religious content of these songs isn't what betrays me, it's the attitude with which I listen, to this and to everything. I extract truths out of music that do not originate in my body, and which I cannot count on verifying through my own experience. And if that isn't the definition of the conversation between a soul and a god, however mundane its avatars, then what is?