A train whistle that isn’t, the fleshy whump of bongos, the plinking of a single, tinny note, the thrum of a too-slack string insistently plucked—these are the sounds that open “Pink and Sour,” the first song on Califone’s new album Roots and Crowns. They share a sense of isolation, as if they had each been made far away from each other, a distance measured in both years and miles. And yet we hear them together, through an expansion of the sonic landscape so daring that it threatens to implode under the burden of unity. What the song needs is a line coursing through its center, something to relieve the stress on its outer walls. When Tim Rutili’s voice enters the mix, channeling the earnestness of country bluesmen and cantors alike, we expect it to bring relief. But the scratchy tune he unreels is too spare to deliver us fully from that initial tension. The song rumbles forward, threatening to collapse before our ears, losing parts along the way until it has been reduced to awkwardly plucked acoustic notes with the patina of a Depression-era field recording. Often gorgeous in the details, “Pink and Sour” never quite resolves into the kind of beauty you can display on your mental mantelpiece. It gives pleasure without giving itself too freely, the perfect metaphor for Roots and Crowns, and for Califone generally.

Rutili, interviewed for this piece, affirms, “I know I don’t like being shouted at” in trying to explain Califone’s approach to songwriting. He worries about “beating a melody or idea to death.” At the same time, the band also wants to avoid the opposite extreme. “We try not to obscure things too much. A little subtlety is nice these days.” The emphasis in his clarification falls squarely on the word “little.” It’s a delicate balancing act, staying poised on the divide between ease and difficulty. That Califone manages to sustain our interest in spite—or perhaps because—of its reluctance to outfit its songs with the structural supports of classic rock, testifies to the feel for sound that sets them apart from other artists interested in stretching the musical frame. The sounds that open “Pink and Sour” may seem isolated from each other, but they compel our interest all by themselves. We may be listening for that line that will make the song whole, but we are happy to listen to it in pieces while we wait.

In this regard, Califone is in step with a broader trend that has been reshaping our sense of what constitutes songwriting in the age of mechanical reproduction. Increasingly, serious artists rely on techniques that resist transcription into musical notation. When it’s not the note that matters so much as where and when it was played, composition takes on an archival dimension. Rutili explains that the band’s approach to craft is “mostly trial and error.” But his definition of this term includes a lot more than jamming together in a practice session. “Maybe someone found an old Casio keyboard at a thrift store or someone found some metal in the ally. It’s different every time.” In other words, the process of discovery includes the search for sounds that cannot be reduced to their specs, in which the history of the object used to make them is an integral part of their character. Although chance plays an important role in the process, the search is not conducted blindly.

“Sometimes I’ll make a list of sounds that I’d like to hear,” notes Rutili. A traditional composer might say the same. In Rutili’s case, however, the list functions like the sort used in scavenger hunts. A source must be found for each sound before it can be made. Thus, when Califone’s equipment was robbed during the tour for their last album Heron King Blues, the loss was especially poignant. Musicians are usually sentimental about their favorite instruments, but it’s easier to replace a Fender Stratocaster than a violin from 1917, which was one of the many items stolen. “Most of it was irreplaceable,” he laments. Although it’s possible to assemble a repertoire of digital samples for a particular instrument, the sort of experiments that Califone specializes in aren’t easily simulated on a computer. Describing the song “Spider’s House,” the press release for Roots and Crowns remarks that it, “is built on the sound of a piano with duct tape and paper clips all over its wires.”

This is not to imply that Califone promotes an anti-digital aesthetic. On the contrary, the band uses the latest technology freely. But there’s an important difference, both quantitatively and qualitatively, between making a recording of a sound, whether in the field or the studio, and making a recording of a recording. Playing an actual instrument inspires a specificity of musical thinking that is largely absent from the experience of making music exclusively on a computer, where the underlying equivalence of all digital data reduces particular use values—the historically accumulated quirks of that 1917 violin, the way the favorite guitar that Rutili lost in the theft felt in his hands—to exchange value. That list of sounds Rutili wants to hear is by definition a list of sounds he’s not going to be able to hear sitting in front of his computer screen, because what he wants to hear is the mournful cry of a world that has been losing its character in the era of profligate copying.

It may seem that Califone works under the sign of paradox. How can you capture and manipulate the sounds of a one-of-a-kind artifact into a record destined for widespread distribution without undermining the uniqueness you wish to celebrate? In one sense, you can’t. But the force of this critique is itself the product of the abstract mindset that hunts down differences and turns them into more of the same. To restrict one’s choices to all or nothing is to succumb to the implacable logic of binary code, in which the universe is flattened into a series of zeroes and ones. Cali-fone’s music is directed at a different constituency, one that’s more flexible and forgiving. The mere fact that it’s possible to articulate the difference between recording a sound and recording a recording of a sound—or a recording of a recording of a recording and so on—indicates that there are shades of gray invisible to the high-contrast lens of the purity-obsessed.

Califone clearly prefers the honest grit of imperfection to the mendacious sheen of spotlessness. Rutili grows passionate in expounding on this point. “I love noise. A lot of what we do takes noise and puts it in places where it shouldn’t belong.” A few years back, the popular alternative rock band Wilco brought this sensibility to mainstream attention by fleshing out the songs on their critically-acclaimed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album with the type of hiss and crackle familiar to anyone who has tried

to tune into a distant radio station. The band freely admitted to being inspired by artists like Sonic Youth, who were in turn influenced by a bevy of avant-garde composers and sound artists. Cal-ifone is clearly a product of the same lineage. But what sets the band apart somewhat from other rock musicians who have dabbled in making noise for noise’s sake is their refusal to regard it as a supplement to a pre-existing song. The noise in Califone songs isn’t just a veil that makes the body of work beneath it more appealing by blurring its contours. Rather, the noise is an important element of their music. Indeed, their music destabilizes the meaning of the word “noise” itself.