John Fell Ryan (on vocals and electronics) was also active in Excepter with
Caitlin Cook (on vocals),
Calder Martin (on percussion) and
Dan Hougland and Macrae Semans (both on digital instruments),
an all-electronic group that debuted on
Ka (Fusetron, 2003), a digital psychedelic collage.
Their praxis, introduced with opener Shattered Skull,
is to distort the song by turning the male and female vocals
into floating incomprehensible voices and instruments into shapeless amoebas
of background sounds.
The voices are trasformed into chaotic drones in See Your Son,
while electronic hisses speed all around them.
Rhythm enters the equation with the eight-minute Be Beyond Be, a sort
of gloomy pounding voodoobilly with otherworldly vocals and all sorts of
noisy detours;
and The Fire And The Wood is an electronic zombie dance a` la
Chrome, although scoured by grotesque voices.
Rhythm and voices seem to proceed in opposite directions in
Hallways, the ultimate case of musical schizophrenia.
On the other hand, Give Me The Cave is eight minutes of childish musique concrete, free jazz and African percussion.
The EP Vacation (Fusetron, 2003), included in the 2004 CD version of Ka, adds two of Ryan's most daring collages: the eight-minute Vacation, in which the male singer's free-form humming mixes with pseudo-dub reverbs, electronic curls and a woman moaning from a distant galaxy; and the 13-minute Forget Me, in which the duet between the male voice's filtered litany (a` la Grateful Dead's Aoxomoxoa) and the ethereal, dilated female vocals is backed by a thicker slab of hissing electronic bliss, something halfway between Gong, Throbbing Gristle and a choir of Tibetan monks.
Unlike the album, that still tried to retain a semblance of song format, the EP lets the music drift ad libitum, and represents the artistic peak of Excepter.
Stream 01 (2003) was the first of a long series of live Excepter recordings.
The EP AG (2003) contains the 16-minute jam AG (and a 12-page booklet of drawings).
Meanwhile, the digital hippies Excepter continued its mission with Throne (Load, 2005), another "concrete" symphony for electronics (Nathan Corbin and Ryan), samplers (Dan Hougland), guitars (Calder Martin) and wordless vocals (Caitlin Cook and Ryan),
containing the demonic-industrial Jrone (Two) and the sideral psychedelic chant The Heart Beat.
The same line-up indulged in the abstract and dislocated soundscapes of
Self Destruction (Fusetron, 2005), notably the sort of minimal techno of BB+B (For 2B÷2C).
With Martin replaced by Jon Nicholson and
Cook replaced by vocalists Lala Harrison and Linda Casey,
they mocked dance music on
Alternation (5RC, 2006), containing the psychedelic Ice Cream Van and Op Pop and the ramshackle Rock Stepper (like Captain Beefheart playing reggae with an industrial band).
The five-song EP Sunbomber (2006) contains the nine-minute Sunbomber, a self-indulgent mayhem of percussion and vocals.
The five-hour digital file 40,000 Leagues Under The SEA (2007), or "Stream 40", the world's longest mp3 file yet, documents the first marathon performances at the cinema-restaurant Monkey Town, which was followed by several more (the six-hour A Return From Black Hole a few months later, "Science" and "Veto Vote" in 2008, "2010 A Space OD" in 2009).
The electronic quartet (Ryan, Corbin, Hougland, Nicholson) on
Debt Dept (Paw Tracks, 2008) offered industrial songs
delivered by vocalists Clare Amory and Lala Harrison, like
the Residents-esque Burgers and the starkly ominous Kill People
The same line-up made the surreal
Black Beach (2009), a set of beach improvisations for flute, percussion and waves, such as the eight-minute Sand Dollar and the 16-minute The Black Beach.
Equinox (2010) compiles two live performances.
Zion (2010), which is actually the live "Stream 58", contains the
slow pow-wow dance Goodbye Babalon and the 21-minute cacophonous frenzied
Jerusalem 2 for vocal spasms, tribal drums and electronic noise simulating a videogame arcade.
Maze of Death (Dog Daze Tapes, 2010) is another set of improvisations:
Maze of Death, which feels like a soundtrack for a horror movie,
Be Lower, which is the usual chaotic random psychedelic collage,
Jerusalem 3, which is musique concrete wed to dance beats,
etc.
Other improvisations appeared on EPs:
the four-song EP Late (2010), with the eight-minute Anastasia, later collected on Later with other rarities;
Christisland (2013), containing two lengthy pieces recorded by Ryan, Nicholson, Lala and Danish musicians;
the three-song EP The Stand (2014), which contains the 11-minute The Fence;
The Sejero Box (2015), which is a 2012 performance by Ryan on synth and his wife Lala on flute;
etc.
The album Familiar (Blast First Petite, 2014) contains
the psychedelic synth-pop jam Palace to Palace and the chaotic
Sunburned Kids that sounds like a No Neck Blues Band relic over mechanical beats.
Each of these recordings, performed by five synth players (Ryan, his wife Lala, Jon Nicholson, Dan Hougland and Nathan Corbin) and by three vocalists (Clare Amory, Ryan and his wife Lala), overflows with great ideas but is littered with at least 50% of filler.
The double-disc Presidence (Paw Tracks, 2010) collects Excepter odds and sodds, focusing on electronic improvisations:
the 31-minute six-movement suite Teleportation, which is the usual chaos
of dilated psychedelic vocals, free improvisation, drones, mechanical beats and
electronic vortices;
the 33-minute solo synth piece Presidence (2003), an austere and almost neoclassical composition, possibly inspired by Terry Riley's minimalism;
the 28-minute droning gloom of OG, another relatively austere piece;
and The Open Well (2008), a 21-minute excerpt of a 17-hour "protest concert".
After a long hiatus, Excepter returned with the EP Debussy (2019), which contains the 21-minute wall-of-noise Lake Effect a` la Gordon Mumma.
