Paul Connolly (a.k.a. - brightbluebeetle) performs at Super Happy Fun Land.

Paul Connolly, a seven-year vet of Houston's improvised music community, hopes that his recently minted Brave New Waves Sound Series will be up to snuff with the other experimental-music happenings around town.

With his deep knowledge and grasp of electronic music, there shouldn't be any worries.

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Can you immerse an audience in sound? Can you turn a musical composition into an experience akin to something visual, such as a painting or film? Houston-based composer Robert McClure thinks that you can and to prove it, he is premiering his latest project, "Untangle My Tongue," this Friday at the Orange Show.

"Untangle My Tongue" will consist of three pieces of music that celebrate both the "Orange Show's unique space and Houston's natural soundscape." The methods McClure has used to create this work certainly go against the grain. He took some recording equipment and walked around the city capturing all that he heard. Cars, traffic, the MetroRail and the buzzing of wildlife are all incorporated into the piece. The Orange Show itself was another inspiration. "While my sounds were deliberately ordered, Houston, a character in itself, will provide an improvisatory element for this performance," says McClure.

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Jaap Blonk

Damon Smith, a Houston-based double bass player and visual artist, completely remembers the first time he heard an interpretation of Kurt Schwitters's Ursonate, a piece of Dada art that's the sonic equivalent of the readymades of Marcel Duchamp in terms of scope and impact.

"I think to have a sound poem organized in sonata form is ground breaking," says Smith, who first heard the piece performed by Eberhard Blum on a hatART record.

Smith is one of the individuals responsible for bringing Jaap Blonk, who will present Schwitters's sonata that's entirely constructed out of phonetics, to Rice University on Tuesday. Blonk, a Dutch composer, musician and poet, is one of the best performers of the Dada-era piece that should be in the same conversation as visual heavyweights Man Ray and André Breton.

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Ayman Harper in (theLID

Thanks to dancer Ayman Harper, Matmos will perform for the first time in Houston this weekend. All it took was for Harper to miss a concert by the popular Matador Records-signed electronic music duo that has done work for Björk.

A few years ago, Harper -- a graduate of the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts who relocated to Berlin, Germany, to pursue a full-time freelancing career in dance and performance theater -- cycled by Berlin's Babylon Theater and noticed the band's name on the marquee. A fan of the Baltimore-based group for years, Harper tried to catch the end of the performance but was too late.

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Pretty much everything has changed since Pauline Oliveros left Houston in 1949 to seek out a music that would later inspire her Deep Listening Institute. Everything except for latency, which, in the sound world, refers to the millisecond delay between when a sound materializes from a system and when that audio signal arrives in an invisible plane. This occurs in all sorts of audio systems, ranging from digital signal processing to the speed of sound in air.

"Anything we do has got latency," Oliveros tells Art Attack by phone from her Kingston, New York home. "We are made out of latency. We even have latency between our ears."

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Courtesy of Nameless Sound

Keith Rowe and Kjell Bjørgeengen

Nameless Sound, after spending the summer chillin'-ish out, is getting back into experimental-programming mode by bringing "the godfather of electro-acoustic improvisation" and a master sculpture of the "flicker image" over from Europe for a rare performance.

Keith Rowe -- a United Kingdom-based tabletop guitarist who lays his ax flat, prepares the instrument with objects and bends sound with effects pedals and mixers -- has a brief history of Houston performances, according to Nameless Sound head honcho David Dove. "Once with AMM in the late '90s and three times previously with NS, most recently at the Rothko Chapel in 2007," says Dove.

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Jonathan Jindra

The Core Trio at a recent Binarium shindig.

Europe has it. So does Japan. The States? Not so much...and that's lame.

When I interviewed Sonny Rollins years back, the veteran saxophonist said the main reason American-based jazz and creative music isn't really in the public consciousness is because there aren't any television programs devoted to the subject. Using Japan's love of the form as an example, Rollins, while on tour in that part of the planet, lamented about tuning in to several television programs, where a host would play a jazz record and then rap about it afterward.

That obviously doesn't happen in this country very often (if at all?), but that's about to change in Houston.

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Members of Borbetomagus

It was, at times, so unlistenable that it was listenable, so absurd that it made perfect sense.

Last night at Avant Garden, a handful of They, Who Sound attendees were hipped to a rare Borbetomagus film. The avant-garde band, formed in upstate New York in the late 1970s, is known for an uncompromising sound that can feel, to the uninitiated, like sonic rape.

In November 2009, Nameless Sound brought members of Borbetomagus to town, where they met Houston-based belly dancer Y.E. Torres (aka. ms. YET), who often performs during improvised music concerts. At one point, Borbetomagus talked about this one gig in 1986 where a belly dancer accompanied their set. They suspected that the experience had been documented on film.

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David Dove

Starting tonight, the weekly "They, Who Sound" creative music series at Avant Garden, 411 Westheimer, shifts its Sunday residency to Monday nights.

The May 1 gig that featured east coast sound sculptors Bonnie Jones and Suzanne Thorpe marked the last time "They, Who Sound" -- which features a gaggle of Houston improvisers, including David Dove, Sandy Ewen and Damon Smith -- will sound off on a Sunday evening.

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Steve Jansen

Tatsuya Nakatani (kneeling) leads his N.G.O. Orchestra.

A woman, worried that the dozens of cymbals and gongs will be too much aural stimulation, moves from the front to the back of the performance space. Moments later, Tatsuya Nakatani creates slices of resonance by bowing five small bowls that sway back and forth on top of a floor tom. It definitely sounds better from the front row.

Originally from Osaka, Japan, the improvisational percussionist has gigged all over the world, ranging from Washington D.C.'s Smithsonian Institution to Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, Argentina. From sight, his setup may seem like a sensory overload in waiting, but as proven by past performances, Nakatani molds creative music that stretches the limits of sound, sans the arbitrary abuse.

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