**1/2 Vocokesh

PARADISE REVISITED

(Drag City)

Vocokesh probably deserve some kind of award as Milwaukee's best-ever krautrock band -- their aesthetic is almost entirely derived from German groups like Amon Düül and Cluster, who made the world safe for long, long, long instrumental jams built around surges of electronic keyboards. Led by guitarist/electronician Richard Franecki, who made his name with the psych/obscuro group F/i, they write via collective improvisation and then monkey with the tapes in the studio.

Sometimes what comes out on their second CD, Paradise Revisited, is lead-footed, crushing four-chord rock (notably "The Circle in the Square"); sometimes it's arrhythmic and as smooth as sheet metal, driven by reverberating electro-whirs and what sound like wind chimes. The centerpiece of the album is "One Brief Glimpse at the Face of Oblivion," a 17-minute drone piece that sounds as if it belonged to the movie scene where the intrepid astronauts discover the singularity in the void. (It seems incomplete without Leonard Nimoy's voice saying, "Fascinating.") Of course Paradise gets draggy over its hour-plus length. But that's sort of the point.

-- Douglas Wolk