King Tears Bat Trip

Thursday, Oct. 24

Mix Haitian voodoo drum ceremonies with avant-garde jazz and you have King Tears Bat Trip. This Seattle-based band rocks four full drum kits, a saxophone, a guitar with all six strings tuned to G, and something called a “Chango” (more on that later). If that all sounds kind of nuts, that’s because it is.

The project was born out of the Racer Sessions, an improv series at Cafe Racer. UW jazz professor and KTBP guitarist Luke Bergman—whose other projects include Thousands, Heatwarmer, and Lonesome Shack—decided he wanted to write a composition that fused the Haitian drum rhythms he’d been digging with the on-the-fly structure of the Racer Sessions. The goal was to create something with a sort of hypnotic, vaguely spiritual effect.

It worked. King Tears Bat Trip’s self-titled album is an ecstatic clusterdrum explosion of rhythmic anarchy, consisting solely of two 18-minute tracks that sound like a specter soaring out of the underworld. Clangorous walls of percussion consume you as the guitar and saxophone wail triumphant, cacophonous melodies that often take sharp plunges into dissonant screeching. The songs can veer from celebratory to terrifying in the blink of an eye.

Furthering the madness is fellow UW alumni Brandon Lucia, a computer programmer who plays a self-created laptop instrument, the “Chango”: a program that reinterprets the patterns of light in video signals into fragmented audio drones. The resulting noise swirls atop the percussive madness, taking the band into one of its most volcanic, apocalyptic musical movements in the middle of “Elevenogram.”

While listening to the album is an experience in itself, there’s a compelling urgency to these sounds that require taking in a live show and witnessing the live, improvisational insanity of it all. You can listen to a wall of drums through headphones, but getting walloped by them in person is completely different.

Some of the fellows in King Tears Bat Trip also started an experimental-jazz label called Tables & Chairs. Tonight’s Tables & Chairs showcase, entitled “Apparitions,” collects some of the most free-form freaks in the Northwest, including Burn List, the Jacob Zimmerman & Gus Carns Duo, and Portland avant-ensemble Pinkish. With King Tears Bat Trip filling the bill, prepare for some delightfully cerebral sonic nuttiness. Columbia City Theater, 4916 Rainier Ave. S., 722-3009, columbiacitytheater.com. 8 p.m. $10 adv./$12 DOS. 21 and over.

KELTON SEARS