or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

The Amen break. The tried-and-true percussion loop has supported all sorts of breakbeat music for years. Starting with hip hop, Amen became increasingly utilized, (and eventually fetishized) in everything from rave-friendly hardcore and jungle to more experimental drill-and-bass, breakcore, and IDM. It’s past a cliché; it’s practically a piece of musical heritage, something worthy of homage. Which is one function of Oiseaux 96-98, released under Keith Fullerton Whitman’s Hrvatski moniker. There’s something about the Amen break, perhaps many things. Oiseaux frequently functions as a dizzying exposé of the expansive possibilities of Amen. But it does much more. Elements of the experimental tone poems Whitman releases under his own name surface here, as well as creatively manipulated samples of classical music, spliced together by an artist with an obvious talent for squeezing distinct personalities out of seemingly barren sample material.

Take the opener, “Routine Exercise.” Amen’s been cut up beyond recognition. It’s been trimmed to a brisk drum roll, which gathers speed to expand into the familiar break. Whitman keeps things lively, altering the loop so it pants like a dog or shakes like maracas before it finally screeches to a halt. Then come the horns. Oh those horns. Deep, long chords, brooding with dissonant menace. It’s Wagnerian, overwhelming. A tweaked jungle sub bass enters the fray, swooping and dodging the Valkyrie horns while the break flips and twists, building up before washing everything away into an atmospheric valley. The bass and horns re-enter suddenly, and the break comes in with renewed vigor. These Valkyries are more than just intimidating now. They’re dangerous, furiously clashing into a melee, eyes red and mouth frothing. They’re demented, out-of-control... it’s horrifying and captivating at the same time. And suddenly everything is washed away again, into stark mountain caves.

Whitman bookends Oiseaux with his most immediately arresting tracks (we’ll come to the last one later), but the middle is full of a library of ideas. “Madrid” pushes the break into indistinct scuffles and clatters like something alive. Using methods that often make music sound clinical and detached, Whitman makes his samples flit like mechanical dragonflies, wound-up and whirring with some sort of internal vitality. The formless “Madrid” provides a sharp contrast to “Atelier,” with a sharp, angular piano loop that bumps along in a shifting time signature. Amen suddenly pops in, keeping a brisk time with that tricky piano. But wait. There are two drum tracks, one in each ear. Amen takes over the right channel while another break wails away in the left. They sway in and out of each other, and the piano, through flips and skips and sound filters galore. There’s a competitive edge to each instrument, as if they’re challenging the others to keep up. One does a little pivot, and another will twist and tweak to keep pace. I think this might be jazz. Then it slams into an incongruous locked groove, relentless, but with shifts in the breakbeats so subtle you’d swear it was your imagination that anything changed at all.

“Ghatham” reaches into the savanna with barren tone pulses and an upbeat Amen, percolating in a comforting fashion, pushed by washes of low-frequency noise. A looped prepared guitar melody provides the grounding for the track. The break drops out while xylophones explore a brief melody before once again giving way to Amen in all its glory. Whitman slices and dices Amen up to keep things vibrant and interesting, but his alterations have an organic continuity that bring to mind wildlife rather than laptop geeks.

“Corcoran” explores a more clinical vein, with interlocking prepared guitar supporting the interplay of dual breakbeats. The beats are so subtly mixed that upon casual listening, you may not even realize there are two independent breaks pounding away. “You Didn’t Look High Enough” rides an uneasy piano into sharp tense jabs. Skittering breaks support an atmosphere of disconcerting tension. “Pulse” accumulates different frequencies of tones in increasing dissonance, forcing them together into sharp feedback spikes. An anxious Amen churns along with a nervous resoluteness, while faint manipulated breaks clang like anvils in the background.

Whitman once again prepares to overwhelm with “Rhetoric.” A wind tunnel gathers strength into a looped noisy tempest. Punishing distorted slabs of noise pound in a relentless rhythm, like a golem bent on revenge. The storm dies before an extended guitar tone, and freakishly distorted singing provides a backing chorus of insane ghosts. The golem returns, pounding with renewed fervor. Caustic breaks begin to fill in the gaps between hits, and suddenly the track explodes into a sinister breakcore riff. It’s what the track seemed to yearn for in the first place. Jagged breaks fly around like mechanical bats with bad wiring. Finally everything fades back into the murky wind tunnel. The golem returns, pounding once again, assisted by more nonsensical and incomprehensible singing. It sounds like a nightmare, more terrifying than the darkest dark drum-and-bass.

“Apostle” puts a cubist spin on jungle, taking apart the break, bass, and guitar melody, warping them, and putting everything back together in endlessly interesting intersections. But this merely cleanses the palette before the majesty of “Cirrusminor.” It’s a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Cirrus Minor,” and it twists the reserved melancholy track into something far more expansive. It begins with the chirping of birds. Gently strummed guitar and mumbled singing aptly recreates the sadness of the original. After the first verse a sub-bass line lurches into the mix, accompanied by a steady Amen. The Pink Floyd version ends with an extended organ outro that fades away gently; here Whitman diverges sharply from the original. Layers of distortion raise the organ into harsh monolithic notes, building into a grating squall. Amen dives headlong into the rock face. This is the climax, the final assault. It crashes through filters and effects, churning through cut-ups and flips. The bass lurches in once more, providing a rollicking ground for the furious Amen. The organ begins to die away, and soon after the bass and Amen follow it into oblivion. But the birds remain. A cold wind carries their chirps down a dark tunnel, a black hole where they are twisted into screams. It’s something primal and unsettling, something far removed from laptop quirkiness. The screams eventually lose all natural reference, finally squeezed into a harsh tone that travels up and down frequencies like a slide whistle. Life becomes dissonant waves of sound.

Oiseaux is an exhausting experience, while providing a virtually inexhaustible supply of repeat listens. Whitman places the minimal elements of his songs together in such subtly measured ways that each sound deserves full attention, let alone the interaction between sounds. More than a jungle or IDM classic, Oiseaux incorporates a considerable variety of music (possibly a result of Whitman’s former occupation at Forced Exposure) into forms that stand as distinct units. Yet the Amen break provides a necessary cohesion, giving the album a strain of continuity that makes the tracks (culled from various releases over several years as the album title suggest) function as the part of a fascinating whole. Forget about silly labels or trendy scenes; this is great, original music without peer.