September 5, 2012 – Geologist: When I was 13, my babysitter's boyfriend played in a punk band. He was a senior in high school. They made a cassette. They had sent it off to a manufacturing plant and got a cover made. I was like, "You can't just make a cassette!" I remember buying it and showing it to friends being like: "There's a band in our town." It was such a big deal. They wanted to sound like a British punk band, so they wanted you to pronounce it 'smoll.' That's the only thing I remember. Back to the Centipedia glossary NEXT: Spectrum

September 5, 2012 – AnCo's tourmates, labelmates, split singlemates, Terrestrial Tonemates, occasional roomates and high-decibel masters of a candy-painted sour-patch squiggle all their own: Brooklyn knob-twurkers Black Dice are not only brothers in arms, but tangled deeply in a symbiotic relationship pushing noise and beatwork to the bleeding edge of the rainbow. Since 2004's Creature Comforts, Dice's contribution is mostly rhythmic, evolving into the most noggin-tobogganing beat-makers this side of Steve Reich or Chicago footwork, a tangle of disoriented phasing, skips, glitches, live-wire boners, locked grooves and Groundhog Day repetition. The nebulous, intangible, broken ear rhythms of recent AnCo songs like "In the Flowers" and "Taste" roll the Dice nimbly Avey Tare: Aphex Twin and Black Sabbath and Merzbow blended into this blissful, heavy experience.

September 5, 2012 – A classically trained Ivy Leaguer and avowed dance-music fanatic (much like current NYC genre-bender Dave Longstreth), Russell spent the better part of the 1980s sawing away on his cello as his disjunctive pop melodies traveled in implausible zigzags. Much like latter-day AnCo, his haunting 1986 masterpiece World of Echo is fractured bubblegum record that still plays nice with '60s minimalism, '70s dub, and '80s polyglot disco. Back to the Centipedia glossary NEXT: SCUBA Diving

September 5, 2012 – The primitive Prophet-pumped synth-drones from John Carpenter films like 1976's Assault on Precinct 13 and 1981's Escape From New York remains one of the most influential sounds in contemporary music — you can hear it in Portishead, Emeralds, Zombi, Oneohtrix Point Never, Gatekeeper, Demdike Stare, and all over Avey Tare's swampy 2010 solo album, Down There. But the closer parallels to AnCo would probably be in the films themselves — the childlike wonder of Starman navigating Earth; the ambient terror of replacing a movie villain with a rolling fogbank in The Fog, or the rowdy band of truth-seeking outcasts in They Live! seeking to prove that conformity is for aliens. Back to the Centipedia glossary NEXT: The Cassini Spacecraft

September 5, 2012 – The summer of 1988 through the summer of 1995: Hip-hop beats were just contemporary minimalism, so SP-1200'd James Brown was probably AnCo's first exposure to 20th Century Composition. Fashion often meant bright colors clashing in kaleidoscopic bursts. De La Soul proved anyone could be hippies and punks and pop stars and sample-crazed avant-gardists all at the same time. The Geto Boys made a five minute horror movie. Early Hype Williams was Jodorowsky with a fish eye lens. It was all a dream... Back to the Centipedia glossary NEXT: Neil Young - Chrome Dreams

September 5, 2012 – Not content just to frolic among Earth's flowers, centipedes, strawberries, fireworks, rabbits, and bees; the moonjocks in AnCo have been known to get downright cosmic, even borrowing a sample from NASA's $3.2 billion Saturn probe, Cassini. The orbiter has been floating around our solar system's second largest (and most aesthetically pleasing) planet since 2004, discovering three new moons, exploring lakes on Titan, and observing the first hurricane we've seen on another planet. But, most importantly, it blasted radio waves through the Saturns rings in an attempt to determine their structure — inadvertently sending some gorgeously out-there sounds our way. Geologist: [The "My Girls" intro], that's a combination of, um….Well the main synthesizer does the arpeggios, but then it's mixed with recordings from the Cassini satellite, when it was in the rings.

September 5, 2012 – As a rock band obsessed with drones, of course AnCo would be drawn to one of its source texts: Tony Conrad, the downtown minimalist composer who rolled deeply and dreamily through the Theater of Eternal Music's mid-'60s experiments with never-ending Möbius strip music. But unlike the meditative clusterbombs of La Monte Young's well-tuned piano and pillow-filled Dream House, Conrad always seemed to inject an extra dose of elbow grease, sawing away maniacally at his violin as if both tone and sweat will get him closer to vibrations of the universe. Plus dude helped name the Velvet Underground, the original rock band obsessed with drones. Geologist: Dave and I used to see him play a lot at The Cooler. In '97 he would play behind the white sheet with a fan and you would just see the shadow. I think when it came to New York we didn't really understand drone and minimalism so much.

September 5, 2012 – German splatter-composer Karlheinz Stockhausen saw no limits to what you could do (or reasonably should do) with sound, rhythm or texture; so he broke every rule and invented new ones over the course of a career that spanned more than 50 years. He'd make orchestras battle or compose for music boxes; he'd make manipulated tapes ooze into live instruments; he'd bring ring modulators into concert halls. His slurred tapes, synesthesia-inducing sounds, and expressionist bursts of percussion accidentally mirrored the effects of hallucinogenics; so, of course, he influenced everyone from the Beatles to The Who to Zappa to Miles Davis to Kraftwerk (former students!) to Björk to AnCo. Back to the Centipedia glossary NEXT: Studio Ghibli

September 5, 2012 – The O.G. for all aspiring curators/experimental filmmakers/found art collectors/misunderstood artists: Harry Smith did it all. His Anthology of American Folk Music, culled from his own hoarding of dusty 78s, brought the old weird America to the attention of new weird Americans like Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead. His hallucinogenic, Dizzy-Gillespie-tracked experimental animations predated the music video age by 30 years. His abstract art burst in geometric explosions. And, before his death in 1991, you could pop by his house and check out his collections of 30,000 Ukrainian Easter eggs, Seminole quilts, and paper airplanes he found floating in the New York City streets. Avey Tare: I appreciate him because of his Renaissance Man quality. Just being into things like collecting the eggs, the film stuff, the musical compilations. It's definitely awesome.

September 5, 2012 – Avey Tare: The whole thing was based on this winter taking over this town, all these different scenarios where people were falling into ice. Deakin: The way I came into thinking about [musique concrète] was by hearing the stuff they were doing. They did this 40-minute long piece that was just this symphony of sound. Like a sonically visual thing and it was kind of the first time I thought about the fact that I was listening to something with headphones with my eyes closed. I became aware of what sound was doing. I thank them for opening that for me. Geologist: Very Winesburg, Ohio," Sherwood Anderson, but a nightmare version. We would use samples and that would become part of the narrative. My wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, still has a cassette in her huge thing of dubbed cassettes from high school.