Have you ever lost a chunk of your life by tackling a piece of art that, in retrospect, might have been a little over your head? I'm all for the idea of stretching out but sometimes we can lose sight of why we took off in a particular direction in the first place.

For me, it was Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow. Some co-workers had been singing the book's praises and I couldn't resist. I bought myself a copy and dug in. One month of late night burning eyeballs later, I was finished. I had to force myself through the last 200 pages. It was not an easy go. A friend of mine asked what the book was about. "About 700 pages," was my half-truthful reply. Yeah, it was snarky thing to say, but it was the best I could come up with. I likened the experience to finishing a jigsaw puzzle that turned out to be nothing but gray.

Did I really lose a month of my life? No. I mean, I have to admit that Pynchon's talent for sentence construction is quite amazing. He can also drop a plot line and pick it up hundreds of pages later and make it all seem effortless. The problem is that almost none of it resonated with me. More than that the overall story never really jelled in my head, it seemed like a bunch of unrelated anecdotes that I picked up along the way — The very cool opening "A screaming comes across the sky"; Slothrop has sex with a woman and later a missile lands, etc. Yeah, I know, it's full of puns and sly asides and all that. At the time though, it felt like work.

This is how I used to feel about improvised music. I just could not figure out what was going on.

It took me quite a while to realize that music, especially the fully improvised kind, need not construct a full plot line in order to make sense. Heck that might not even be the intent. If you listen to what's going on in the moment — if you listen to what the players are listening to — it can open the door to a completely different way of perceiving music.

And so it is with Totem>. Their members' self-description, "Men making metal machinery," is both tongue in cheek and accurate. With electric guitarist Bruce Eisenbeil, bassist Tom Blancarte, and drummer Andrew Drury, Totem> combines extended technique with advanced listening prowess to create textured sheets of sound. With moods ranging from thoughtful and pensive to blasphemous angst, Solar Forge can at times give the impression that the guys are dismantling their instruments with a set of needle-nose pliers and a ball peen hammer. If, however, you can focus on the musical interactions, there's a lot of beauty to be found right there in the middle of the molten chaos.