A small, crudely sketched bear sits perched atop an abstract tree on the inside cover of Horn of Plenty, Brooklyn quartet Grizzly Bear's debut. For a record that unobtrusively fashions elements of conventional folk with dreamy, electrocentric experimentation, it's a rather fitting image – one that not only hints at their willingness to go out on a sonic limb, but also bolsters the frequent comparisons to Animal Collective.

Sure, the minimalist production of "Shift" is reminiscent of the stripped-down, old-timey eeriness of CocoRosie, but Grizzly Bear aren't just suckling at the already-tender teat of psych-folk. "A Good Place" opens with soft acoustic strums, a shaker, and Edward Droste's whispered vocals but builds patiently with ambient noise, scratches, and blips that veer away from anything too genre-specific. In fact, the references are all over the place. Vocally, "Eaves Dropping" sounds most like the Beta Band, while the pulsing synthesizer on "Alligator" could have been swiped from the Album Leaf's laptop, which makes sense.

What began as a series of home recordings by Droste was eventually fully realized with tech support from Christopher Bear (the band says the synergy of its name and his animalistic surname are happenstance). Layering subtle hand claps, xylophone, strings, and whistling, Grizzly Bear construct an ethereal backdrop for Droste and Bear's mysterious, echoing vocals. Originally released, and underappreciated, in 2004, this rerelease also features a second disc of remixes by Efterklang, the Double, and Dntel, who's best known for his work in the Postal Service. With another full-length due in 2006, Grizzly Bear could go in a hundred different directions. Your guess is as good as mine as to which one they'll opt to travel in. (Steven Leckart)

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
Summer in the Southeast (Drag City)

Thank heavens for Superwolf – without it, we might have forever lost Will Oldham to his many masks. For those keeping score, Summer in the Southeast is the second retrospective of Oldham's catalog released in as many years. Last year's Greatest Palace Music (also performed under the Bonnie "Prince" Billy moniker) reimagined some of the bard's best as performed by a glitzy band of Nashville's elite. In theory, it sounded like a gutsy, Dylan-esque transformation, but the actual fruit was bland. On Summer in the Southeast, a live album recorded in Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and North Carolina, Oldham refracts his back pages through alt-country's lens: His band here sounds like Magnolia Electric Co.'s brothers in the minor-key.

The casual fans will surely find more to like in this collection, though don't expect any minds to be blown. In truth, the record reminds me most of those few dozen live albums Neil Young has released (Crazy Horse's fuzz looms large over the proceedings, especially on the plodding version of "Death to Everyone" – has anyone ever stopped to wonder if the Neil influence is a good thing?); it's totally inessential, though packaged with enough great songs to make for a pleasant happy-hour listen. The best moments are mostly the quiet ones (plaintive readings of "Nomadic Revelry," "Wolf Among Wolves," and "Beast for Thee") as well as a few soaring choruses (the crowning climax of "I See a Darkness"), although they all feel like easy victories. Even the rockier affairs sound casually tossed off: Witness "O Let It Be," "Take However Long You Want," and "Ease down the Road." Still, these are songs that many, myself included, have lived with for some time, and one can't help but think this rollicking record might be ripe for some lazy summer's road trip months down the line. (Max Goldberg)

Steve Reich and Musicians
Live 1977: From the Kitchen Archives No. 2 (Orange Mountain Music)

Though more than a quarter century has passed since Steve Reich and friends recorded this performance in New York art haven the Kitchen, these pieces have an untarnished freshness. Maybe the deceptive simplicity of Reich's concepts keeps his work from sounding dated, even as pieces reliant on the "cutting edge" technology of the time can betray their age.

A prime example of an idea whose simplicity is deceiving is the 1968 composition "Pendulum Music," wherein microphones swing back and forth in front of an amplifier, playing with feedback and giving a sonic representation to some principles of physics. It's also an eerie, ghostlike sound, squeaky and rhythmic and not at all out of place among some of today's harsher noise acts. In this performance, the feedback settles into a steady moan for five minutes, a primitive waveform with subtle shifts in color and tone. Reich himself said of the piece, "It's audible sculpture. If it's done right, it's kind of funny."

I got into Reich from hearing his tape loop experiments, which led to his technique of phasing, repeated lines falling out of synch with each other and turning something like a street preacher's rant ("It's Gonna Rain") into a broken phoneme machine, sensible syllables slurred into staccato blocks of sound. Steven Guibbory's "Violin Phase" performance here achieves the same effect, with Guibbory playing live alongside three prerecorded violin tracks gradually phasing in and out with each other. Reich's interest in Balinese and African music comes to the fore with "Music for Pieces of Wood" and "Drumming – Part Four": The former is hypnotic and clicky with claves, while the latter is playfully melodic with glockenspiel, bongos, voices, and whistles.

The Kitchen tapes were gathering dust in boxes until archivist Stephen Vitiello got to work on these reissues. The nonprofit arts organization started in 1971 and gave working space to video artists and musicians like Laurie Anderson, Tony Conrad, and Christian Marclay. This sort of institutional acceptance of edgy artists into some sort of canon seems to happen faster and more definitively in New York than anywhere else, but skimming this history does make it bubble with some magical energy of a time when more rules were being made and broken than the overinformed and transgression-numbed present.

Though regarded as a piece of pioneering minimalism, this recording makes me consider Reich's place in a continuum between the politesse of the academy and the noise to come from downtown bohos and other liminal types like Rhys Chatham. These pieces seem like more of a breakthrough in terms of extending perception and opening up a sonic palette. (George Chen)