Christopher Forbes ecstatically embraces punk and hippie idealism with his solo noise-folk project, Kites. His DIY ethic seems as pure as could be for a band with label support: All his instruments are either homemade or modified and include electronics, a three-stringed, tinny acoustic guitar, and an ergonomically altered thumb-piano. Kites's latest disc, Peace Trials, was recorded on cassette four-track without the assistance of computers, samplers, or digital synthesizers. As a result, the album has a much warmer feel than most noise albums, with beautifully thick tape hiss and rich, junked-out tones.

But to stamp Peace Trials with a hippie vibe is somewhat deceptive. Within its eight tracks are blistering doses of high squeals that pierce until the buzz blurs and create hologramlike overtones. Thick curtains of coarse sounds roll around, scraping like metallic tools against gravel. The tones of feedback and oscillating pulsations hark back to early industrial/noise bands including Nurse with Wound, Throbbing Gristle, and Whitehouse.

While several tracks are not exactly acoustic, they work as subdued, forest-dwelling, minstrel-style psychedelic folk songs, recorded with very little low end. These tunes sound primitive, almost medieval, and would be creepy if Forbes's voice didn't resemble an angelic Frank Zappa's. During the first couple listens, I was turned off by these tunes, but in the context of breaking down the album, I've come to fall in love with their quirky pop qualities. Still, the album does not waste a minute dwelling on any sound to the point of tedium, demanding 30 minutes of fully engaged listening and begging for heavy rotation. This is honestly one of the most well-constructed noise albums I have heard in a while. Kites play Wed/16, 6:30 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, SF. (415) 923-0923. (James Squeaky)

Boards of Canada
The Campfire Headphase (Warp)

There's a reason that Boards of Canada's records appeal as much to dreadlocked hippie stoners as they do to bookish IDM enthusiasts. With each new album, the duo – Scots Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin – seem to touch sinewy, fancy-free ambient and hard-boiled experimentalism in equal measure. They're trippy without ever trippin'.

The Campfire Headphase reaches further in toward the pair's collective psyche, making the journey inside the mind as peaceful as it is perplexing. Take a quick peek at Headphase's formalist cover art. The blurred, turquoise figure in the foreground resembles, in that Ken Burns-close-up sort of way, a highlighted chunk of the artwork from their 1998 opus, Music Has the Right to Children (Matador). And this is very much the sound that's evoked here – a snapshot of that record photocopied tenfold, all-encompassing but exactingly minimal.

Here, they're not so much playing with song structures as with timbre and tone color. The drum manipulations have an extra hint of hiss and snap; guitars are more pastoral and wiry; and on "Chromakey Dreamcoat," the disc's real leadoff track – preceded by a round and stringy 40-second synthesizer intro – the airy filter effects are dazzling. Boards of Canada are going for the cinematic flourishes; after all, the band takes its name from Canada's National Film Board, and tracks like "Hey Saturday Sun" or the ping-ponged pleasantries on "Dayvan Cowboy" sound as if they've been yanked from a Spike Jonze montage. The band's signature gauzy tone and style remain constant throughout, but when they attempt to zone in on it, they never fail to find exciting new corners in an otherwise familiar place. (Ken Taylor)

SupremeEx
Destructor (Rumble Pack)

In 1999 this guy Stinke who ran the Hieroglyphics Web site put out an EP with Tajai from Souls of Mischief. The EP was called Projecto 2501, and in addition to coming with trading cards, the music was excellent. Now, five years later, Stinke, a.k.a. SupremeEx, has relocated from Philly to Oakland and has released a record he recorded before Projecto. Why not a sequel to Projecto? Hold your horses – that's coming out soon.

Destructor consists of mostly instrumentals punctuated by samples taken from anime, rap songs, and a recorded phone conflict between two angry kids. The phone call is hilarious. "74 Degrees" starts with 20 seconds of a Chi Ali song. Why is Chi Ali on there? I have no idea. Why is Chi Ali in jail? Because he blasted his girlfriend's brother. Also included are instrumentals from Projecto 2501, which is great because they knock. The songs include mostly uptempo loops backed by drum machine beats, and the loops consist of samples and original synth material. Most songs contain breaks during which the loop drops out so you can hear the drums by their damn selves, and the drums are meticulously orchestrated and have lots of little things going on.

Have you ever gone to Compton to interview a low-rider club and then watched two superthugs walk up to the house and thought, "I don't think I can beat these guys in a fight"? That's what I did yesterday. When I came home I listened to this record. (Nate Denver)

Animal Collective
Feels (Fat Cat)

Once in a while an album comes to completely absorb my listening time. I listen to it in the shower, on the street, at the DMV, at my great uncle's funeral; I leave it playing in the background as I watch TV. After a few days on a constant loop, the record is captive in my hearing, trapped in my osseous labyrinth; I only continue listening to compare the real song with the afterimage, or echo, in my memory. Feels is such an album, recapitulating the childlike glee of Sung Tongs's barks and chants and making ecstatic pop out of pagan, experimental folk. The aesthetic and the tone of the lyrics, the preoccupation with nature, and the mystique of their work and identity warrant the naming of a new genre: I'd call it spirit folk.

In contrast to the many bright songs on this album are a handful of intolerable numbers: "Daffy Duck" and "Bees" limp through crookedly ambient guitar and noise with light vocals that are softened to near-sighs. They don't serve the songs as much as they do on the similarly constructed and beautiful "Loch Raven" or build a mood for the tracks that follow, and they've yet to obtain a comfortable foothold in my labyrinth of repeat listening. On the whole, though, Feels leans almost entirely toward the bright; Animal Collective are informed by a wide array of elder pop-experimentalists and folk acts and are developing their own tradition that unites elements from those varied influences with each successive release. Feels is an addictive testament to that. Animal Collective play Mon/21, 8 p.m., Great American Music Hall, SF. (415) 478-2277. (Sean Maylone)