Graham Sutton is the "Pendulum Man." A fiercely irreverant and unbound sense of sonic sorcery haunts Hex, but at the center of soundstorm, Sutton is the conductor of this masterpiece of a record. The rest of the members of the band were essentially cogs of gradual flourishes throughout the album featuring stray swells of vibraphone, cocaphonous horn bits and strange slabs of synth sprayed about with little coherence but very much affecting and impressionistic abandon.

Forget Simon Reynolds' now-infamous declaration of the heretofore noted "genre" of Post-Rock, Hex is uninterested in the ascending arpeggios of future forebearers Explosions In The Sky, bombastic, dystopian guitar epics of Godspeed You! Black Emperor or even Mogwai's mettalic foray into seemingly every offshoot of the rock genre. Bark Psychosis was aiming skyward, ephemeral, and Hex is their testament to an adventurer's spirit, unconvinced by his own musical discoveries and consequently all the better for it.

The album itself, beginning with the stately "The Loom," is structured according to Sutton's then-increasing interest in introducing house/jungle-like repetition into a more traditional-sounding instrumental setup and the results are intoxicatingly askew in structure but nontheless inviting and invigorating over twenty years later. "A Street Scene" sways serenly over undulating bass and the spritely tremolo'd guitar line, while "Bigshot" sounds like a rock-rendering of an Avalanches-track. Sutton's vocals are awash in controlled croons and near-whispers. Very little of what is said is straight ahead, much like his music.

Bark Psychosis would end up adrift in a musical landscape whose closest contemporaries might've been Seefeel and the electronically-inclined cabal of soundscapers at heart, but, much like Radiohead circa Kid A era, Bark Psychosis never really had a foothold on any one musical avenue. Yet, unfortunately for them, they did not have the same kind of pull or audience as Radiohead but, nontheless, Hex burgeons with titanic and bizarrely memorable song structures that recall a singular tome in musical history. Just make sure the daylight is dwindling and your ears demand a deafening display of daring from a seemingly apocraphyl but always-interesting artist. Listen, don't think.