The ambition to coin new idioms, thus rejecting prefab ones, was evident in Boston in groups such as Human Sexual Response. The lineup included four singers, a guitarist (Rich Gilbert), a drummer (Malcolm Travis), and a bassist (Rich Cortese), and they performed a hybrid of disco music, new wave, and art-rock, which reached its best expression in the 1980 album Figure 14 (Eat). Among prodigious hybrids, such as Guardian Angel, which attempts to fuse hard rock with 1950s vocal harmonies, a surreal, emphatic, cabaret-like attitude emerges (Dick And Jane, Jackie Onassis, Unba Unba), culminating in the pantomime of What Does Sex Mean To Me.

Ignored by everyone, the band died after a second album, In A Roman Mood (Passport). As proof of the different sensibilities within that circle, Gilbert and singer Larry Bangor later formed Zulus, which also included Travis and Cortese at various points. After a single album, Down On The Floor (Slash, 1989), this group too disbanded.

Meanwhile, Gilbert, Travis, and Cortese had already formed the Concussion Ensemble, composed of four percussionists (Travis, Terry Donahue, Larry Dersch, and Brian Gillespie), two guitarists (Gilbert and Mike Brown), and a bassist (Cortese), with no singer. If for the first two years (1988 and 1989) the group existed only on paper, occasionally performing its complex instrumental pieces, little by little the project took shape. In 1993, after Travis had joined Sugar and been replaced by Ken Winokur, the first recording appeared: the single Bulldozer / Carny (Singles Only), a highly original reworking of instrumental rock clichés, as if the Ventures had become zombies or Link Wray had led a Native American powwow.

The album Stampede (Conc, 1993) collects their best-known live pieces and stands as a milestone in instrumental rock. The method behind compositions such as Nausea and Roadkill is to generate a terrifying force by layering hard rock guitar roars, minimalist repetition, and percussive inventions (a voodoo cadence, a drum roll, and so on). What emerges is both an exaggeration (in terms of sheer volume) and a reduction (in terms of thematic development) of the concept of collective improvisation. It also produces pieces that, mysteriously, end up resembling 1970s blues-rock.
While for a group of this kind the infernal poly-tribalism of Smash-Up and the exotic one of Voodoo are almost natural, Requiem, with its slow, martial crescendo, and Cleopatra 94, with its majestically archaic stride, show how these premises can lead to far more sophisticated solutions. And it is not unlikely that the most important intuition for the future is Vertigo, in which their obsessive percussionism is pushed into hardcore speed. The Concussion Ensemble nonetheless entrusts its musical testament to the long and elaborate Bugs, which abandons geometric structures in favor of a harmonic freedom reminiscent of free jazz and avant-garde music.

Winokur and Donahue also play in the Alloy Orchestra, which specializes in silent film soundtracks: New Music For Silent Films (Accurate, 1994), Lonesome (BIB, 1995), and Silents (Accurate, 1998) collect their scores, which often use homemade instruments and found sounds, but always place memorable melodies inspired by the tradition of popular music ahead of experimentation.

Caleb Sampson, che suona le tastiere, ha composto anche la colonna sonora per il film Fast Cheap & Out Of Control (Accurate, 1998), per orchestra da camera, sintetizzatore e fisarmonica.

In 1999 the Alloy Orchestra became a trio with the addition of Roger Miller. Instrumentation includes a 5-meter long rack of metal junk, percussion, accordion and clarinet. Masters Of Slapstick (Accurate, 2001) collects 42 brief absurdist experiments in the vein of Half Japanese and Residents.