Gutbucket is a free-range band. The five-year-old New York quartet is not only equally comfortable playing in front of 900 sweatily pogo-ing teenage skate-punks, or a crowd of stoned jamband freaks, or on an anarchist German art collective houseboat, but also, most importantly, their music fits right in. On \'Dry Humping the American Dream,\' the band the Village Voice dubbed \"stomprovisors\" thrashes and twitches (sometimes literally) through 10 cartoonishly complex compositions.

Flitting from Latin to thrash to polka to klezmer and back, often within the space of a few bars, the group veritably attacks their music with the kind of ferocity usually reserved for punk, despite having earned their jazz bona fides. \"We---re all pretty serious about rock,\" says saxophonist Ken Thomson, \"and not just a token throwing-in of some different tunes. Its something intrinsic to who we are as people. We\'ve all had training in jazz, but we\'d like to move outside that world into the rock world, and actually bring something new to that.\"

Though the band might seem rooted in the genre exploding of avant-squonk (their 2001 debut, InsomniacsDream, was released on the Knitting Factory house imprint, while Dry Humping the American Dream was issued in Europe on the legendary Enja label), this might be an easier move than it sounds. The four band members are, if nothing else, products of suburban radio. Bassist Eric Rockwin claims to have learned every Paul McCartney bassline by heart before his father humbled him with a Ray Brown CD. Guitarist Ty Citerman was \"into everything that was Hendrix and Van Halen and Led Zeppelin.\" And drummer Paul Chuffo learned to play by mimicking The Who\'s Keith Moon.

It\'s only fitting, then, that the band came together under the auspices of Columbia University\'s WKCR, where Ty had a late-night radio show and Paul was the self-admitted \"crazy guy in the corner smoking cigarettes and writing papers.\" After playing together for four years in the soul-jazz Ex Caminos, Ty, Ken, and Paul split off in 1999 to form what would become Gutbucket. Introduced through a friend, Eric and Paul found an instant rhythmic rapport, and the band was born. Four months later, they debuted before a packed house at Manhattan\'s Baby Jupiter.

Gutbucket set to work building the all-important live rep, gigging first throughout Manhattan, before spreading across the collegiate markets of the east coast and - with the release of InsomniacsDream - making the leap over the big pond to Europe in 2001. \"They think we\'re jazz over there,\" Ty says of the idyllic trips. \"Over there, we stay in hotels and get fed. We like to go there. We\'re art over there. I\'m not sure what we are over here.\"

FAGHAT is well known to Madison music fans for their loopy take on slightly lethargic surf/glam rock. Think Roxy Music and Velvet Underground if they didn\'t take themselves so seriously and with a touch of circus.