I once had a friend who would frequently quote Louis Armstrong in

discussions of music: "If it sounds good, it is good," he'd say.

"You

can't argue with that," concurs Skeleton Key bassist Erik Sanko. His band's

genre defying full-length debut, Fantastic Spikes Through Balloon, aptly

embodies the Armstrong principle.

The album is marked by a rhythmic,

mechanical cacophony generated by Rick Lee, Skeleton Key's trash player.

That is...trashman? Whatever his title, Lee inventively bangs on a bevy of

discarded junk to drive the factory-like sound of the band's nonetheless

tuneful songs.

Skeleton Key grew out of the avant garde scene fostered by

New York's Knitting Factory club. In 1994 Sanko, a veteran of John Lurie's

Lounge Lizards, accepted an invite from Chris Maxwell (guitar) to play with

Stephen Calhoon (drums), who was new to the city. "The three of us played

together," recounts Sanko, "and it was very comfortable and easy. It was very

self-explanatory as to what to do." Despite his appreciation for the early

groove between players, "easy" was not what Sanko was looking

for.

"Skeleton Key needed somebody pounding on trash to become fully

realized," Sanko explains. "It wanted to be this big, mechanical thing, and we

were missing an engine." After enlisting Lee (now also a member of the Blues

Explosion/Cibo Matto collaboration, Butter 08), Sanko experienced a gratifying

sense of relief. "We said, OK, the band's done. We can go on now.

Lee's

refuse ensemble consists of several core items, including a metal table base,

an empty freon tank, industrial pots, a folding chair augmented with sheet

metal and a gong, a red wagon, and a modified high hat. He outfits these

mainstays with other pieces that get destroyed regularly, such as wood blocks.

Sanko notes that there have been rejected creations among the bunch. "We used

to do a song where he had a big piece of metal that he played with a bow, and

that was very hard to mike. So he figured out some other way of making the same

horrifying sound.

Lee's unorthodox...