Stafford Davis is I/O\I, a self-produced experimental pop project emerging from Aurora, Colorado. The music itself employs a variety of styles, refreshingly avoiding any one easy classification. Davis readily switches from ambient sounds to soaring Rock God lines to folk. That's right, Rock God and folk star. When an artist takes on the bold meshing of styles, however, abruptness more often than not just sounds funny.

For example, following a brief acoustic guitar interlude, Davis' opening track "Exit 286" transitions into a section of honky-tonk piano banged out over drum and bass beats. Above the clutter a distorted voice shouts "noise in the field" with an attitude that would resemble the early Beastie Boys recordings if the three MCs from Brooklyn had not tempered haughtiness with irony and humor. In moments like these Davis hits that crushingly ambiguous note that forces listeners to question the artist's intended message. Is he being serious? Is this funny, or just sad?

Experimentalists in the most general understanding embrace the definition of music as organized noise. How a musician chooses to organize a given set of sounds comprises his or her "art." The relationship between the musician and the music ends here. Qualifications such as "good" or "bad" emerge only between the music and the listener. This latter relationship reveals how effectively the music elicits a response from the listener, intended or otherwise. Not everyone prescribes to these definitions. However, they serve as fitting tools for understanding the most ambient bars written by self-prescribed experimentalists. For example, the track "Las Vegas!" separates sections with sped up reverse bars of distorted tape that resembles the garbled sound of flipping quickly through the radio. These bars offset the rhythm of the more musical sections, creating unresolved tension. What purpose does this tension serve? For the listener the satisfaction of rhythmic displacement usually occurs during its resolution. In this case, unresolved interruption of otherwise stable sections only proves the artist's ability to disturb anything resembling interesting music.

On another level, Davis' organization of sounds succeeds in exciting the ear. The middle section of "Own" reveals the artist's ability to deftly tease clean, colorful notes out of both the acoustic and electric guitar in an ethereal sound world filled with prog rock's use of counterpoint. At the same time, overall placement of the compositions themselves leaves the listener skipping through tracks like "Dirt and Dark" and "Footprints from the Day Before." Spaces of naturally occurring noises between composed pieces such as these – whether interpreted as studies in sound or as commentaries on the relatively arbitrary classification of music – end up just coming off as scraps pompously thrown together in hopes of accidentally creating a concept album.

In the end, casual listeners of pop music may ask what the point of listening to experimental music IS. For many the purpose of experimenting with music is to find nontraditional forms that excite the ear in new ways, a goal that despite its display of good musical technique I/O\I most certainly fails to achieve.