"Animated by only three artists, the San Francisco-based multidisciplinary collective Discord Aggregate quickly established itself as one of the most prolific, eclectic, puzzling, and overall exciting art groups in America. Their activities encompass music, literature, video art, web art, and Internet events, but their works reaching the widest audience (and that's still very small) are their music productions.

Writer A. Molotkov met S.B. Reda, an ex-musician who turned to visual arts and literature, in June 1994. They started to write and produce video art together. In February 1996, they decided to leave Albany, NY, to establish themselves in San Francisco, CA. A month later, on March 18, to be precise, they met singer/experimental artist Pamela Zero in front of the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. They immediately decided to create Discord Aggregate, a collective that would embrace any and all art forms. Work starts on The Attack of the Absolute Zero, a non-opera that will be recorded a few months later and released on CD in September 1997. Focused on the voice, spoken and sung, it blends literature and experimental music in a form that recalls but is not quite a hörspiel.

The album is only one aspect of Discord Aggregate's activities. A website (www.discord-aggregate.com) is devised to host all projects, including the turn of the century interactive Internet art "The Tower of Babble." In late 1998, recording of the second CD, The Texture of the Sky, was finished, in parallel with a novel by the same title from Molotkov and Reda. This time around, the group decided not to hire studio musicians and handle all instruments themselves. The CD was released in July 2001."

François Couture, All Music Guide http://www.allmusicguide.com/

"The Attack of the Absolute Zeros had been written and recorded only months after A. Molotkov, S.B. Reda, and Pamela Zero formed Discord Aggregate. Although ideas showed a commending level of maturity, the album relied on session musicians. By mid-1998, S.B. Reda had come back to music and Molotkov was learning keyboards, violin, and percussion. Therefore The Texture of the Sky (released in July 2001) became an autarkical effort. Consequently it shows a deeper integration of its literary and musical aspects, but also a more complex, even twisted structure that makes it more difficult to get into than the generally linear plot of the previous CD. The Texture of the Sky is based on an interactive novel by Molotkov and Reda. The plot can be summed up in one sentence: the sky wants you to dream, you want to wake up. The album is comprised of six vocal and music works split into short parts (none of the 31 tracks runs over four minutes). These sections are scattered all over the CD and the listener is encouraged to use the random function of the CD player to generate his or her own sequence (although ending with "The Message" is very nice). The technique is similar to The Attack of the Absolute Zeros: a story with a narrator and characters is interpreted and blended with Pamela Zero's multi-tracked vocal pieces and musical accompaniments. The latter part has significantly improved and features very strong loose compositions that enhance the dream effect. Of course, this CD is better when listened to under perfect conditions, with no distractions and with headphones. Strongly recommended to avant-garde fans, especially those interested in hörspiels."

François Couture, All Music Guide, http://www.allmusicguide.com/

"Discord Aggregate is a San Francisco based group of multimedia based experimental artists. Some may remember their previous release The Attack of the Absolute Zeros (a jazz non-opera) from 1997, reviewed in issue #14. The Texture of the Sky is an even more ambitious project, described in its own liner notes as “...an interactive novel in which you are the main character.” One might imagine this album as six distinct pieces or themes, plus an epilog, broken into 31 pieces and then scrambled, much like a movie with six parallel plots that somehow manage to work together. The pieces stretch the boundaries of art and music, fusing spoken theatrical ideas with classical, world music, minimalism, and industrial textures, with melodic (and sometimes treated) vocals. The three principals are Pamela Zero, S.B.Reda, and A.Molotkov, all who contribute vocals and instrumentation (percussion, guitar, bass, violin, keyboards, sax, sitar and electronics), often multi-tracked. While many of the ideas here are laced with pure experimentation, they maintain a strong artistic sensibility that fuses well with the expressive imagery of the story line as it continues. Some parts of this sonic continuum are very dense with sounds and voices, while others are sparse and minimalistic, and the contrasts that flow and juxtapose within the overall piece certainly work well to make this an engaging listen. Highly recommended for the open minded, explorative listener."

Peter Thelen, Expose Magaizine, http://www.expose.org

"After a week or two of reviewing indie rock records, I usually need a break from guitar-jangle and off-key vocals. I want to hear something weird -- an odd little art recording, perhaps, or a semi-coherent spoken word piece. Something out of the ordinary, in other words. If you share my need for peculiarity, your ship has come in. The Texture of the Sky doesn't merely let its freak flag fly; it will chase you down the street, swinging and jabbing at your head with the flagpole.

Three and a half years ago, I reviewed Discord Aggregate's "non-opera" The Attack of the Absolute Zeros, an allegorical tale of individuality presented with stunning attention to spatialization and audio trickery. The Attack of the Absolute Zeros was defiantly, sometimes mouth-foamingly weird...but The Texture of the Sky makes it sound like a Raffi record.

The Discord Aggregate collective -- S. B. Reda, Pamela Zero and A. Molotkov -- offers its own descriptions of The Texture of the Sky. On the disc's back cover, they call it "over 60 minutes of joyful tension." This seems true enough, if overly succinct. The Texture of the Sky is definitely full of, and the source of, tension (though, as my wife's response to the disc makes clear, not all of it is necessarily joyful). The inner sleeve offers a little more detail, describing The Texture of the Sky as "...an interactive novel in which you are the main character. You travel through a series of dreams imposed by the Sky, choosing your destination at the end of each page. The Sky is an information vampire trying to absorb the reality of your dreams and keep you dreaming forever."

In other words, it's what happens when you combine dimethyltriptamine with Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Six individual "works" -- combinations of repeated musical sequences, spoken word segments and unclassifiable noise -- most divided into multiple tracks, make up the disc. The tracks are not in order, but shuffled together in a seemingly haphazard fashion; "The Center", for instance, is made up of tracks five, nine, 11, 15, 17, 21, 24, 27 and 30. Needless to say, using your CD player's "shuffle play" feature isn't going to make things any less coherent, and indeed Discord Aggregate encourages it. Voices mutter, howl, chant, scream and sing; phrases like "The growth experience has not yet begun", "You are staggering down a long corridor" and the cryptic "Zabda Rect" crop up over and over. There seems to be a subplot about "getting through customs", but it's hard to tell what, precisely, that means in the disc's context; real world details are all too quickly subverted by metaphor, allegory and...well, odd noises. The music -- texture-intensive combinations of violin, sitar, guitar, keyboards, theremin and various drums -- offers no clues, either.

Despite its intractability, and the fact that as an overall experience it's often uncomfortably like being trapped in an elevator with a performance art troupe, The Texture of the Sky is oddly vibrant. It's full of life and energy, bubbling over with a seething desire to create, create, create, to push at the boundaries of art and entertainment. Sometimes it's disturbing, and on a few occasions it's amateurish, but it's rarely gratuitously "artsy" or willfully obscure -- which, if you think about it, is what makes most performance art annoying. It's a harrowing experience, to be sure, but it will leave you energized -- and oddly compelled to listen again. Or it may be the single most annoying, horrifying thing you've ever heard. Or, most likely, both."

George Zahora, Splendid E-Zine, http://www.splendidezine.com/

"the "songs" have been split up over various tracks and then turned into spaghetti. Curious to see how that works out?  This nicely packaged item is the follow-up to the Attack Of The Absolute Zeroes which was a kind of musical type thing. There is also an interactive novel called the Texture Of The Sky on which this musical trip was based.

The album:

On the information coming with the disc, each of the tracks is explained in detail, and what I read there is indeed quite much like what happens on the track. Reading the texts however probably tells you little of what the listening experience will be like. And an experience it is. For somebody such as me, who writes down his opinions and the like track by track, this album is a nightmare. The trio has taken six tracks and split them up into thirty parts merging the parts then in an arbitary way into a sequence of thirty short tracks. Some tracks have been split up into more parts than others, and the order is in no simple way. What I should probably do is to write about the original tracks and then tell you how about the effect of the intertwining. This is what I did: I reconstructed the original order of the tracks by using a program in which one can write down the track playing order.

The Carrier Of Time is a piece in which string instrumentation and high female vocals figure for the most part. There is also some talking and explaining going on. The music is mostly repetitive and might be described as neo-classical and is rather sparse. The idea behind the track is to play each subsequent note with a different instrument giving the whole a rather nervous character. All parts are quite similar in style (to my ears).

The Custom - Reprise has throaty vocals in the style of Tibetan monks with S.B. Reda speaking over this in a panicky voice. The song is about going through customs while having nothing to hide (but do you? Incertainty creeps in).  The track is quite short on the whole.

Zabda Rect (at first I thought they were saying Subdirect all the time) combines a number of vocal styles and intonations. There is not any music as such here, just the vocals.

The Center is a scary piece of work and also one of the major ones on this album. Eerie female ahhhs, lots of percussion, with monstrous vocals, more eerie female vocalizations and also some repetitive sparse violin sounds, dissonant keyboards and sound effects such as the creaking of wood (it sounds like that). During the keyboard parts Lustmord came to mind. The song ends with a vacuumcleaning siren going off.

Island is the next one. It is the sung counterpart of Zabda Rect. This means weird vocalizations and vibrato's. The improvised vocals are mixed and yield an eerie choir. The Zabda of Zabda Rect returns here. As it is explained in the "booklet" this track is a companion of Zabda Rect. Towards the end the patterns become more intricate, more is going on at the same time. Generally three different types of vocals are used: the rather ordinary clear vocals of Pamela Zero, and some high pitched vibrating vocals and thirdly low vibrating waahooh vocals.

Custom has the Middle Eastern styled vocals of Pamela Zero. She really has a very flexible voice. It is surprising that she manages to hold in this talent for the most part of this cd. You might compare her vocal style with that of Joan Osborne, but Pamela reaches quite a bit higher. The music is quite percussive and because of the vocals we get a kind of recitational melodic world music. Later parts are more free form, but with the vocal style thoroughly Indian/Eastern, but also with screams and howls. The third part finds us without the screams, but with the more sensible vocals of Zero. This is quite beautiful and more "music" like than anything on the album. The next part is again more free form. The vocals of Zero remind me of a large collection of buzzing insects. Part five is the conclusion and is also the longest track on the album.

Now how does this all work out when split up among each other? Quite well in fact. It is a bit like reading story that jumps from one place/time to another and thereby builds up tension and yields a kind of variation. When listening to the tracks themselves the music is easier to follow, but the lack of variation within the tracks makes the album less interesting.

The final track on the album is only a single part for a song. The Message features warped vocals, in a message from the Sky.

Conclusion:

I like this one a lot more than the previous one of the band, the story of which was a bit too much over the top. The "music" on this album is extremely experimental, bordering on the overly intellectual, but I have to admit liking it all the same.

The band also explains what it is doing (and in a way also why) and that makes it an interesting listening experience. There is very little music on this album so even people who like bands such as Univers Zero might have a hard time enjoying this. I am thinking more of Musique Concrete or the soundtrack to some kind of radio program here. There are some likenesses with projects such as Lustmord. Only for the most avant-garde and minimalist. But the above are only approximative descriptions: it is very hard to come up with something concrete to describe something which sounds so abstract.

Jurriaan Hage, Axiom of Choice, http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/jur/progrock.html