A year in the making and largely informed by the Ensemble’s roots and experiences in the level of DIY broadcasting that SCTV once lovingly parodied, this is Bren’t Lewiis’s most thorough homage yet to vox populi media: call-in AM radio, YouTube, public access TV, infomercial fails, obsolete instructionals, and amateur self-help cassettes that offer guidance of dubious utility.

You get several meanings in the blink of an eye (to paraphrase Olivia Tremor Control) in this 69-minute rationality-flouting obstacle course. Assertions and their opposites contain veracity and patent untruth. Cyclical repetition meets the deliberately deployed and the gloriously arbitrary. Electric guitars and toy instruments and maniacal grunts careen across layers of grinding reel-to-reel noise and compromised cellphone transmissions. Looped fweeps and saturated hornk keep time throughout stretches of impromptu stress tests, insect percussion, anonymous background rumbles and rustles, pizza cutter schwing, and the crackle of scratchy old thrift store records. Sing-song chirps from skewed pop and cult memories meet hacked and damaged recordings of insufficient improv and anthropomorphized household objects.

As is usually the case with their ADHD rondo à la yank, the implied nonexistence of vacuums in nature (or anywhere) manifests in nonstop bombardment by, and in corruption of, external artifacts, fleeting references, appropriations, cover versions, homages, and chance meetings.

Selective citation is deployed sporadically in covert stabs at mongrelization and butchery of lyrics, while the visibility of treasures unearthed by the appropriations committee ranges from latent to blatant: celebrities reading their autobiographies; radio dramas from the 1930s; staples of the miscelleanous section of used record shops; hyperventilating evangelical scolds; soliloquies from movies; vintage, on-the-spot news reports; product testimonials; rural folk music and stilted court music; psychologically damaged politicians; and cartoons.
The recurring bit as a framing device gets a good workout here, in the form of excerpts from bureaucratic performance evaluations, rendered in a parallax-heavy, cubist style; and Tom Timpson’s amazing collection of cornball-and-surrealism-infused bumpers for three imaginary daytime chat shows.

The group’s 1980s infancy makes cameos as well, in the form of a spontaneous unconscious performance of “My Down Booties Were Eaten By Pat’s Dog’’ by a DJ on WFMU, a duet for prepared guitar and felt-covered coat hanger by Tim Smyth and Gnarlos (originally released on the BLE’s debut cassette Make It Stop), and a new recording of Lucian Tielens reading an old poem that’s an appropriately schitzy collision of commandment, declaration, and neologistic gibberish.