This Austin, Texas trio has a reputation for being the band that "hooked up their half-broken electronic shit all wrong." If you could take a punk band and make their little ADD-addled brains focus for longer than two minutes, put them in a room full of electronic equipment and lock the door, the album they eventually recorded would something like One Ten Hundred Thousand Million. A lot of stuff would get busted, nothing would be done conventionally, and the result would be incredibly intriguing. This is techno for people who don't understand the appeal of the glowstick -- the pure exuberant energy of punk filtered through a mass of computer gadgetry, and proof that guitars and technology can not only get along, but have a good time together.

After moving to Austin from Houston for school, Josh and Yvonne Lambert (yes, they're married) formed The Octopus Project in 1999 with Toto Miranda, another veteran of the Houston scene. Since then, they've recorded two albums and worked with enough people to fill a football roster. Their sound is a testament to this open collaboration -- instrumental post-rock that combines enough influences and instruments to make your head spin, melding guitars with samplers, drums with drum machines, reality with dreams until you stop caring which is which. The songs on One Ten Hundred Thousand Million run the gamut of electronic music, from "Malaria Codes"' trance-inducing melancholy to "Six Feet Up"'s dance-groove bass and "Tuxedo Hat"'s breakbeat experimentation. Every song is built on a beat that would do DJ Shadow proud, providing the waves of keyboard melodies with enough room to crash into each other between bouts of controlled guitar noise and funky bass lines. There's some fascinating sonic exploration in this heady mix, sometimes bordering on inane (a la the samples in "Responsible Stu", apparently taken from an instructional guitar cassette). It's hard to tell how these songs were created, and it's likely that even the band would have trouble recreating them, so let's be thankful that we have One Ten Hundred Thousand Million as proof of the ingenuity that's possible when disparate sounds are forced to interact, and hope The Octopus Project comes around again soon to show us what more they can come up with.