The rock format is a flexible thing. It can take a lot of abuse and still be pretty damn presentable. I've long had a fascination with songs that take that court the limits of that flexibility. Just how many rock-n-roll signposts can you remove before the listener loses their way? Songs that do this well don't come along very often; I've been collecting tracks like this since the early 90s, and the material on this mix is pretty evenly spread across that time-frame.

Of course, there's a host of ways to upend expectations in music. The most common is to confuse the rhythm: what happens to rock-n-roll stripped of its reliable motorik pulse? That doesn't necessarily mean the song has no measure of time, more often than not they've just gone out of their wide to obfuscate it. The human voice can also be a wonderfully destablizing tool: it is the de facto centerpiece of every pop song, so when it runs afield or if it competes with multi-tracked versions of itself for your attention, you are instantly in new territory. Others actually approach the problem from the opposite side: all you are left with is a familiar voice and a metronomic pulse, left stark or adorned with abject noise. Some strip all expression out of the performance, lending a hypnotic and unsettling monotone to the proceedings. Even more cast emotive, even soulful vocals into ameobic drifts of sound, leaving them as alien anomolies in their own space. Each of these is on display here, a collection of songs bent entirely out of shape.

What do you call each of these? Sound art? Many of them feature familiar sounds, even familiar techniques. All of them feature singing of some sort or other. I think that is part of what fascinates me so: the simple inclusion of a voice humanizes even the most extreme abuse to the songform. It gives us an anchor, from which we can maybe go further out than we have before.

I think it worth noting that, while I am usually cogniscent of trying to make sure I include some female-led groups in just about every collection, this mix easily veered much closer to a 50-50 ratio. I believe that breaking with tradition is always easier when you are considered outside that tradition to begin with: it says a lot about the desultory state of women' acceptance in rock if they are alienated enough that deviating from the 'norm' is an elementary option. That is not to say that there are no women in rock-n-roll (that would be a stupid statement) but that as I've posited before, they have a much narrower field of play that society in general will accept them in. This applies to every aspect, from what they sound like and what subjects they talk about, to what they play (if we let them play at all) to what they look like. I would hope that these women, on the margins might be the vangaurd in changing that.