By Eliot Wilder / From Al-Qaeda to Queer Eye to Viagra to The Passion of the Christ, the world's one big mash-up of sounds, symbols and sensations. Who can make sense of any of it? Camus wrote: "Of whom and of what indeed can I say: 'I know that!' This heart within me can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction." These constructs are like Rorschach tests, and the best we can do is guess at their meanings, most of which are, when it comes down to it, just nonsense.

Postmodernism embraces incoherence and fragmentation, and frees the artist to play with nonsense. This can result in work that is either trivial (think reality TV) or it can be transcendent (think Wes Anderson). Think also the Beta Band. Vocalist Stephen Mason, DJ/sampler John MacLean, bassist Richard Greentree and drummer Robin Jones have made a career out of celebrating chaos. Their "sound," if you can even attempt to define it, emphasizes discontinuity and fragmentation over formal structures.

Over the course of three albums (four, if you count their collection of early singles, 1999's The Three EPs), the Edinburgh band has built a loose canon that is more about instinct and spontaneity than coherence and meaning. Sure, their songs tend to wander down a crooked path, and sometimes they stumble off the path altogether - with its bird calls, scratches, tablas, brutal breaks and mumbled vocals, the tune "Monolith" squiggles along for a patience-testing 16 minutes. But they are endlessly inventive, knocking over conventions with the ease of an Olympian leaping over hurdles.

"We all listen to and are influenced by a vast array of music," Mason tells me. "Literally every form of music from the '30s until now." Jones chimes in: "We make the sounds that excite us. It's physically impossible for us to do something that bores us to tears. So we try to do something original."

With its fantasia of Nick Drake-esque pastoral bits and laptop electronica, The Three EPs - which culls 1997's Champion Versions and '98's The Patty Patty Sound and Los Amigos del Beta Bandidos - is indeed something original. Clever, but not so much that it lacks heart, an imperative for the band. When I mention turntablist DJ Shadow as a possible collagist in arms, Mason sternly calls him to task: "He doesn't have any soul. It's like listening to a man who's trying to prove to you that he's got a great record collection."

The Three EPs made their reputation, garnering the Betas an earnest fan base (helped no doubt by the groovy segment featuring the song "Dry the Rain" in the film High Fidelity) and critical kudos. But the group's formal self-titled debut, also issued in '99, was a furiously deranged and difficult record, an uncomfortable melange of barbershop quartet, hip-hop, rockabilly, psychedelia and nursery rhyme goofiness (about all of these elements are smooshed into the wonky opener, "The Beta Band Rap"). "I just want to be left alone and never bothered ever again," Mason sings on the dolorous "Round the Bend," and you get the sense that that's exactly where he's gone. Pitched at extremes and full of abstractions, The Beta Band was also loaded with possibilities and not, as the band members themselves would have it, "fucking awful" - c'mon "It's Not Too Beautiful" is too beautiful. However, it did defy expectation and category. And it nearly unmade their reputation.

"I didn't like it," Mason says flatly in reference to The Beta Band. "I was suffering really badly from depression at the time and so the whole thing was very negative, a very negative experience for everyone involved."

"We were riding a breaking wave of enthusiasm from the recording industry," Jones recalls, "and suddenly we were told that we had six weeks to do a new album. We thought we'd just go into the studio and start recording, because that's always worked in the past and everything would be all right."

Winging it, in this instance, did not prove fruitful. "For example, 'It's Not Too Beautiful' is about nine minutes on the album," Mason says. "What I had written for that before we went into the studio was only about a minute-and-a-half long." Mason sees that tune, as well as the rest of the record, as not enough good ideas stretched too thinly, and he's reticent to dredge up the bad memories it conjures. "It's pretty depressing to keep talking about it, because that album is now five years old, and we've struggled so hard to forget about it and move on."

2001's Hot Shots II saw the Betas moving on, opening with Mason, obviously smarting from The Beta Band, chanting, "I've seen the demons, but they didn't make a sound. / They tried to reach me, but I lay upon the ground." It's still fragmented, obscure and even bonkers in spots, but it's also playful, warm and spare, with the band adopting a less is more policy with regards to the overall sound. No extended or aimless musical opuses here (the longest track clocks in at 6:30, downright terse by Beta standards). "Gone" only uses just guitar, piano and haunting vocals to make its point and "Dragon" is simple, lo-fi electronica. Whereas The Beta Band was an acid-tinged, wide-scream Technicolor production, Hot Shots II was a sepia-hued indie flick.

"We found a completely different way of working on Hot Shots II," Mason says. "It was the first time everyone had got computers and we were able to go away and work on the tracks on own own, and then we all came together in a rehearsal studio and sorted the songs out. There's so much more preparation on that album than the previous one, and that's why it's a much better record."

The process worked so famously with Hot Shots II that the group continued it on their latest, Heroes to Zeros. "On the new record I did acoustic and vocal versions of the songs I'd written and gave it to the band," says Mason, "and then they went away and did whole new versions of the songs. And then we come together, strip those apart and work out what we like and what we don't like. We get one final version, which is what we all end up working on together. We feel more comfortable working this way rather than having the pressure of three people standing over you saying, 'Do something - do something good.'"

"This way you can sit down with a glass of wine and a cigar," Jones adds. "It's a much more satisfying way to work."

On and off, the Betas spent a full 18 months on Heroes to Zeros and, with producer Nigel Godrich handling the mix, they sound like a band that is truly finding its way. Heroes is idiosyncratic yet catchy, hallucinatory yet concise, and as in-your-face as anything they've done. "Abrasive," Mason calls it. Programmed beats and samples are fully integrated with a living, breathing band, and although it still could be considered experimental, it also could nominally be considered pop, with songs that sound like, well, songs. Could this mean the Betas will soon be casting off their cult shackles? Or is this cruise toward the mainstream just one more left turn in what will likely be a career of left turns?

"We wanted to make it a bit more up-tempo and more exciting than the records we'd done before," Mason says, "as well as sort of quietly angry." Angry with what? "Maybe, uh, the foreign policy of, uh, certain governments. But instead of going RAHRAHRAHR ... we're just going grrrrrrr."

"The album's a reaction against people who think we're nothing but a bunch of hippie stoners," Jones says. "Also, we wanted to try something new. We finally had the confidence to get these sort of sounds. Before we had always been separated from getting at the purity of what we were trying to attain. There was always a producer in the way or someone saying, 'You've only got this much time to lay down so many ideas.' But we understand the process much better now and we all know what we want."

Whatever it is that they want, whether it's emphasizing irony and parody or taking hot shots at the foreign policy of, uh, certain governments, the Beta Band refuse to be pigeonholed. Because above all else, from their ramshackle records to their silly costumes to their inscrutable attitude toward their supporters, the Beta Band revel in ambiguity - they take joy in taking the piss.

Bullshit meter peaked? The Beta Band to the rescue!

From Amplifier magazine