"Holy shit, Agnes! When did they put in the landing strip next door?!" Before pushing play on Gravitar's newly issued "lost" album, a better safety precaution than putting your trays in the upright and locked position would be to make sure that your volume knob is turned down -- way down. Edifier's first song, "#1 11/22/97", drops you in medias res, headfirst into a spiraling pit of churning sound. Combining the flowing improvisation of free jazz with the bombast of heavy metal (free metal?), the three young men of Gravitar rachet up the volume without resorting to lowest common denominator power chords.

Recorded in 1997 but only recently released (thus the "lost" appellation), Edifier takes the techniques of psychedelic rock and jazz, rips them to shreds and recombines the parts in a broken blender, with a jigger of distortion and two shots of feedback, to create an emotionally raw art. "Eskimo Angel" builds slowly, a repeating guitar line following an escalating drum toward the expected apocalypse; the eleven minute track continues to build tension through its quiet finale, as the melodic guitar returns to offer closure. Most of the eight tracks here are long -- only one is under five minutes, and many, like the seventeen minute closer, are considerably longer -- but the band rarely succumbs to the noodling impulse. The weakest track, interestingly, is one of the sparest, as "#4 11/23/97" adds a choppy piano and a sitar-sounding guitar line but loses its way in a meandering composition.

Ultimately, groove distinguishes Gravitar from other "experimental noise" combos. At unlikely intervals, just as the songs are about to implode into squalling black holes, a hint of melody or a snaking drumbeat yanks the band back from dissolution. While Gravitar is essentially a power trio, there's enough space within even the noisiest song that individual instruments can play off and around each other without smothering the listener in an undistinguishable mush. As loud as Gravitar gets, there's little sense of the overpowering angst which defines so much modern hard rock; the band sounds closer to Japanese noise-mongers like High Rise, who revel, rather than rage, in the cathartic impulse to sound like a jumbo jet.