A few weeks ago I wrote up Extra Life; now here comes another offshoot of NYC avant-garde rockers Zs: a quartet of dual sax, guitar and drums by the name of Little Women. Little Women’s debut recording is a 19-minute thrash-jazz blowout released by SocketsCDR, a local label run by Sean Peoples (of FFFFs, Hand Fed Babies, Big Cats and so on). Sockets has previously put out a bunch of DC experimental/noise type stuff, with some 40+ releases under its belt. I believe Teeth is actually their first or second release to come out on an actual pressed CD rather than a CD-R.

There’s a good-cop bad-cop kind of thing going on here: if Extra Life is the nice, accessible Zs spinoff, Little Women are the mean, violent mofos. Much less structured and rigorously composed than Zs’ chamber-music approach to math rock, Teeth sounds like a live-in-the-studio take, featuring all the energy of a punk rock show distilled into less than 20 minutes. The two saxophonists alternate between improvised flailing skronk of the most strident kind and blistering unison lines, with frequent breakdowns that showcase Ben Greenberg (the Zs member here) pounding away with a clean, undistorted guitar tone. Like Univers Zero, who I profiled last week, it’s impossible to pigeonhole this stuff; one moment there’s an obviously free jazz-influenced blowfest, the next there’s a thrash-metal breakdown, and through it all there’s this kind of punk-rock aggro.

The final track ends with some or all of the band members babbling and screaming with maniacal abandon, all pretense of “music” tossed aside. Like the rest of this short debut album, it’s not pretty, but it’s certainly intense, and it will probably alienate a lot of listeners. It’s also an indication that these guys don’t take themselves too seriously, an ever-present criticism when it comes to such uncompromisingly uncommercial music.

In lots of music that attempts to fuse influences from disparate genres, the discerning listener can say, “oh, there’s the rock beat,” “and there’s the jazzy solo,” “and there’s the traditional folk melody,” deconstructing the music piece-by-piece into component genres. But then there’s Univers Zero, a Belgian so-called “chamber rock” ensemble whose albums have all been released by Silver Spring’s Cuneiform Records. Earlier this year, Cuneiform issued a remastered, expanded version of the band’s self-titled debut, originally released in 1977.

Univers Zero take their cues from 20th century classical music and then amp it up with a rock sensibility. But wait! Don’t run away just yet — we’re not talking Emerson, Lake and Palmer-style Cheez Whiz here. UZ’s almost entirely acoustic sound blurs genre boundaries much more effectively than most any conventional rock band’s efforts to set already bombastic Romantic-period classical music to a thumping backbeat. Instead, if Béla Bartók had lived until the late ’70s and became a rock drummer, this is the kind of stuff he might have written.

Univers Zero, the record, kicks off with its centerpiece, the 15-minute “Ronde.” Scratchy violins set a loping rhythm to start the piece off, soon joined by a melodic lead on bassoon (an instrument that figures very prominently in the group’s overall sound). Bandleader/composer/drummer Daniel Denis joins shortly, his drumming never really rock-oriented, instead providing color and accenting, occasionally egging the band on with a driving rhythm. The composition twists and turns, spotlighting the bassoon and later a violin-led freakout that wouldn’t have been out of place on some of the records that, say, Peter Brötzmann was doing around the same time. Through it all, an ensemble mentality dominates; there are solos, but the real action is in the compositional drama.

The big treat on the reissue, though, is the bonus track “La Faulx,” a nearly 30-minute live version of the epic opening track from Univers Zero’s second album, Heresie. It’s the ultimate Halloween music; you’ve never heard a harmonium sound this evil before. Indeed, this band only got better as it matured; the debut is nice, but then a run of three near-masterpieces ensued — much of this happening during the cultural wasteland known as the 80s. All these records are in print on Cuneiform, alongside several newer, more overtly rock-oriented albums from the band’s relatively recent (1999-present) reunion.

Last year, one of the best concerts I saw was the modern chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound at the Library of Congress. In many ways, Univers Zero’s music is very similar to the polyrhythmic chaos of the compositions that Alarm Will Sound played at that show last year. If only Denis wasn’t pigeonholed as a rock drummer, I could see him leading his group at the Coolidge Auditorium just as well as I could see him at the Velvet Lounge. That’s a testament to how well, and how seamlessly, Univers Zero melds intellectual Western classical music with visceral rock.

Fairfax’s VHF Records has been around since the early ’90s, releasing the kind of fringey experimental stuff in which Aethenor — a project of Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley — fits comfortably. Despite the lineage, doom or drone metal this is not; instead, Aethenor’s style is an improvised ambient music that paints vivid imagery through amorphous sound.

The visual aspect of Aethenor’s music is certainly helped on by evocative album titles. Their first album (also on VHF) was called Deep In Ocean Sunk the Lamp of Light, a title matched by the submerged, claustrophic nature of the music. This year’s Betimes Black Cloudmasses, on the other hand, starts off with an appropriately airy feel, with a solid bass pulse underlying lazily drifting electronics. Things naturally get a bit more oppressive as the song and the album progress — you’d have to be surprised if they didn’t, given the members of the band (O’Malley, Daniel O’Sullivan of noisy droners Guapo, and Vincent de Roguin of dark Swiss post-rockers Shora) — but the overall sound still manages to evoke mental scenery akin to summer thunderstorm-filled skies.

Perhaps that’s just the way titles (and album art) works when it comes to ambient music, as the only concrete visual cues in a style of music devoid not only of words but also largely of recognizable melody. But regardless of the mechanism, VHF and Aethenor have put out one of the more mysteriously compelling records I’ve heard so far this year. Probably not stuff you want to be blasting out of your car stereo, but Betimes Black Cloudmasses is definitely some sweet late-night headphone music.

Move your eyes to the right a little bit, maybe scroll up or down some, and you’ll come across a tidy little list of D.C.-area record labels. Among this list are some incredibly obscure labels releasing incredibly esoteric music. Over the next little while I’ll be briefly profiling a few 2008 releases from a few of these labels (four to be exact), starting today with Planaria Recordings.

Currently highlighted on the Planaria Web site’s splash screen is Extra Life, a New York City-based group led by Charlie Looker, formerly of Zs (also on Planaria). Zs wowed a small crowd at the Hosiery last year (with Looker) and a much larger crowd at Velvet Lounge last month (without him), playing a highly composed, dissonant avant-rock that has all of the band members hunched over their scores yet still managing to rock out. Extra Life shows obvious signs of this lineage, but ported into a much more accessible form.

It seems that Looker was a bit of an anomaly in Zs. One interview has a Zs member saying “Charlie writes the hits. I don’t even fucking get where he’s coming from.” After hearing Secular Works, Extra Life’s debut full-length on Planaria, it makes sense that Looker felt he needed to leave Zs: this is a totally different animal. Think math-rock overlaid with oddly soothing vocals that have the feel of a monotonic medieval chant, and you’re on the right track. While parts of the opening track remind of Discipline-era King Crimson (interlocking guitar lines, shifting rhythms), there are also some nearly indie-pop numbers that actually inspire me to (gasp) sing along.

Crowds at the Zs shows in D.C. tended to stand stock-still, mesmerized or perhaps just overwhelmed by the sheer force of all the music-theory-in-action going straight over their heads (and lest I be called elitist, I definitely fall into both these categories myself). But I’d guess an Extra Life show would be an entirely different affair. I can just imagine 15 people in a tiny venue trying to dance and sing along to this stuff, and it’s a satisfyingly amusing image.