At some point in 1992, Matt Kellum, Bill Kellum, and Justin Chearno let the tape run during one of their improv sessions. They had done this before as part of Rake, but for some reason these sessions marked the beginning of Doldrums and eventually wound up in its debut album Secret Life of Machines. That one didn't crack Billboard's vaunted Hot 100 list, though it is, in my opinion, a more sinister album.

And the rest is history. They recorded sporadically throughout the '90s, sifted through dozens of tapes, added a few overdubs, and roughly every two years they would release an album. In four records, they traveled the short distance between the drug haze of Secret Life, with songs like "Weird Orbits," and the psychedelic groove of "Grill Out Time." At first blush you're likely to think Matt's drumming is carrying most of the load for the band. Before he gets things going, "Weird Orbits" stumbles through four minutes of cavernous rumblings and the hum-and-hiss of a guitar going through many pedals. Eventually, he puts a floor under Bill and Justin's shards of sounds, and then adds some drum fills to make you think they're all moving faster than they really are. No doubt, a beat helps moves things along, but the shifting hues and shapes of Bill and Justin's guitars cast a lingering spell. On a second listen, the first four minutes makes your skin taunt. It's walking against a gale, or perhaps like moving through a thick cloud of dry ice. And sure enough, when the drums surface they seem majestic, but so would anything else of considerable size.

As I say, their name doesn't lie, and that's a good thing. The space of the Doldrums is baffling place. During "Ascending Copper Mountain" you picture a lame propeller of a small plane, while "X-Ray Me, Bert" makes you think of pebbles falling through a gargantuan rain stick. But since Justin Chearno has moved on to Turing Machine and Matt Kellum is playing with the indie-pop outfit Chomsky, we wondered if we'd get to return there once again. We asked Bill Kellum, who kindly requested we put it all in writing and exchange e-mails for a month. His responses are largely unedited, though the order of the questions has been altered to make us look a little sharper.

Are you currently working on an album, be it as Doldrums or under another name?

Bill Kellum: I'm not sure what we're doing, to be honest. We haven't played together in a long time. Unfortunately, our jobs and other musical lives have just about made it impossible to travel anymore. Matt plays with Chomsky in Dallas, and Justin plays with Turing Machine, who have a record out on Jade Tree. My wife and I have twin boys who were born last May, that's been keeping the time available for rock music activities pretty low, so I've been concentrating on VHF activities, since I can work on that for a few minutes here and there.

We recorded a few hours worth of stuff on multitrack as a quartet with Jimmy Driscoll (Chomsky) on bass in New York back in September 1999. I took a crack at making a rough mix of it a few months later, but as far as turning it into a record, it never really got beyond circulating copies of the raw tracks for everyone to listen to. I did send the tapes to Matt and Jimmy in Texas a few months ago. They were going to load them into Pro Tools and try to make some sort of mix of the best of it. We will probably get together to play again someday, I know we'd all like to.

I have been recording some solo things (acoustic and electric) fitfully over the last couple of years, but I don't know if any of that will end up being released to the general public. I am really enjoying playing the acoustic steel string again after a long time of being exclusively electric, but I don't think I'm doing anything on it yet that anyone would want to listen to, unless people want to hear my terrible renditions of [Bob] Dylan and Allman Brothers songs.

Have to admit I'm a little surprised to hear you talk about Dylan and the Allman Brothers. What are you listening to these days?

Kellum: I have eclectic tastes, I guess. The CDs stacked on the desk in my office are by Bob Dylan, Grateful Dead, Ali Akbar Kahn, Munir Bashir, Terry Riley, Sun Ra, Stefan Basho-Junghans, Simon Wickham-Smith, etc., etc.

Mostly I have been listening to Pelt and Black Twig, as I've been using a lot of my spare time to assemble, master, troubleshoot, etc., their new releases, both of which were drawn from a huge disorganized pile of tapes and CDs. If I don't hear anymore live Pelt tapes for a while, that will be okay.

One of my sons is named Dylan, if that gives you any idea of my interest in his music.

I was looking through Doldrums' records sleeves lately and I realized that all four albums took you quite a while to finish. Wondering what your method is? Do you record for only a couple days at a time at most and then sift through the tapes? Does Justin or Matt play a role in the mixing?

On your last album, Desk Trickery, much was said about the laborious computer editing and modulating process. That was somewhat surprising to me. Was bringing in the computer any different, in terms of writing or recording songs?

Kellum: I hate to admit it, but the press mumbo-jumbo about the computers was kind of a cynical marketing ploy. We told the Kranky boys to "talk up the computer angle." It didn't really help us sell any more records or land any lucrative T.V. commercials or anything like that. It was edited on a computer and it did take a couple of years to put together, but the lengthy gestation was more because of other commitments than because of a lot of difficult computer hacking.

There are a couple of spots where there's some obvious computer manipulation--the little intro collage, the burbling noise on "Free Festival of the Stone Bridge"--but the basis of every track is a live recording of the three of us wailing away. Most of the weird guitar sounds are from using bows or other extended techniques. The kind of choked guitar sound that plays the melody on "Sparkling Deadheadz" is made by sticking a piece of a drumstick under the strings between the pickups and then plucking behind it. Feng Shui was made that way too. It's basically a live performance with a few select overdubs and a couple of spots where there's a loop of all three of us playing.

On the recordings we made that haven't been released yet, I did run my guitar through a laptop running a piece of software called AudioMulch. The software mangles the signal, and then I use a little mixer to blend it with the unaltered sound. Some of it sounds great, some like crap, but there's an unpredictability that I really like. Some of the sounds that come out of the amplifier are really a surprise. We did one gig where I used it, but I think it works better on the recordings. There's a lot of subtle processing that is impossible to pick out over the roar of three other guys. I'm sure there are other people doing it better, the hardware and software have probably advanced a lot in the last year and a half.

Sounds like Doldrums doesn't play shows very often.

Kellum: We've only played a handful of shows ever. We would like to play more, but the travel makes it almost impossible, what with the day jobs and all. The gigs have always been improvised, some including off-the-cuff rock-with-singing numbers, even. All of the shows have been good, I think, except maybe the last time we played in Philadelphia, where we played kind of a dull, plodding set.