By George Chen

JAMES JACKSON TOTH flinches at my casual use of "the N word": "I wouldn't say 'nomadic,' there's so many connotations with that. It sounds kind of hippie." He's explaining his recent move to Knoxville, Tenn., from his native New York, and his goal of having his band members support themselves by touring as much as possible. As the core of a revolving collective known as Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice, Toth (a.k.a. Wooden Wand Jehovah), methinks, doth protest too much. WWVV spill out of the many possible boxes of psych, folk, blues, and "new weird America," but cursory listens to their latest full-length, XIAO (Troubleman Unlimited) or the recent LP Sunset Sleeves (Weird Forest) do make one consider the hippie factor of plinky acoustic instruments, spoken-word spiels, and an air thick with something unnamed and uncanny.

Toth keeps my queries grounded in reality, whereas his music pushes toward a fantasy image of what we squares crave – cloudy caravans, dense with bohemian clichés and cut adrift from day jobs. "For us, it's more about not having the responsibility of doing things we don't want to do," he tells me. "It's really simple shit. 'Nomadic,' sure – but it's just kind of about doing everything ourselves and keeping ourselves happy every day and not having to worry about creature comforts."

Even this simple credo seems like a shock to this oversaturated media grunt, who expects something more like cult-leader charisma or missionary zeal to crawl through the phone's fibers and have me PayPal-ing my tithe to the WWVV cause. A collective fluctuating from an average of seven members to a touring formation of five, Toth and his compatriots Heidi Diehl, Steven "the Harvester," Satya Sai, and Glucas Crane have been making a stir among the CD-R and tape label underground over the past three years, releasing what seems like a record a month. Their first bar-coded products are the aforementioned XIAO and two fall releases on Olympia, Wash.'s 5 Rue Christine imprint. The abundance of sounds and flow falls along lines of freedom jazz, the tone explorations of Loren Connors, Jackie-O Motherfucker, electro-acoustic music, and the organic folk dronings coming out of Finland.

Toth and his Golden Calves bandmate Tovah O'Rourke met at SUNY-Purchase College. "We were friends during orientation," Toth recalls. "We bonded over our love of indie and underground, which was more of the punk rock stuff." Under the tutelage of other Purchase alums at Tower Recordings and by working at the local record store, both expanded their horizons and, in 1996, they started the Polyamory label. "It's kind of the old story: We got exposed to a crash course in krautrock and free jazz, and then suddenly it was like, 'Oh, this other stuff is lame.' " Four of the other members of WWVV also went to Purchase, and three still reside in New York (specifically, Brooklyn), though there are auxiliary members spread throughout the country. O'Rourke, who still runs Polyamory with Toth, appears on XIAO and plays in Dead Machines with her husband, John Olson.

One gets the sense that WWVV's nonmusical elements are more important than their status as a consumer product. They view music-making as a dialogue with the unseen, as opposed to an intellectual exercise. When asked about the Christian imagery that's abundant on XIAO and lyrics that drop some Old- and New Testament knowledge, Toth again avoids branding. "As for our own personal beliefs and stuff, we are five separate individuals, and everyone believes different stuff," he says, describing himself as a "spiritual dilettante, finding things in different orthodoxies that I find useful, whether it's my life or art. I apply those things – whether it's Christian pantheism, numerology, or, like, Anton LaVey or something. It's all in there. We're just readers, and obviously some ideologies and orthodoxies appeal to us more than others, but as a group, I couldn't really say one way or another where we fall on that." The female vocals on the cassette Live at Pasture Aspen Farms (23 Productions) definitely sound like those of a spiritual or hymn. These full and sunny songs mention "good news" and "all things coming to pass," but there's still a sense of ambiguity amid the celebratory clatter.

The cult vibe may just be a sort of theatricality absent from the punk scene from which WWVV's members spring. Toth credits his hardcore adolescence, spent reading Maximum Rocknroll and memorizing Kent Mclard's PO box, as key influences on the band. "That's the one thing we all really share, even the two other members of the touring band who don't really come from that background – we all understand that nothing really matters except the DIY spirit," Toth explains. "We fall on different sides of things musically, politically, socially, but we all kind of believe in just cutting out the middleman."

It's hard to see MRR or HeartattaCk faithfuls partake of the WWVV Kool-Aid pitcher, but as with other orthodoxies from which Toth gleans, he sees a related ethic living on in this project. "Aesthetically, it's different, but as far as the ideology, it's completely the same," he says. "We could be in 1996 and we could be playing in some hardcore band, and we wouldn't behave all that differently or expect anything other than what we would be getting." While labels like "hippie," "punk," "noise," and "nomad" all seem to fall apart the more you pick at them, or maybe become conflated to share "freak" status in opposition to mass-cult America, WWVV are peeling free a blank space that feels authentic and open to the possibilities that all those categories shut out.

Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice perform with Skygreen Leopards and Castanets Thurs/30, 9:30 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $7. (415) 923-0923.