CMJ: Hundred Waters Suspends Time

Chad Batka for The New York Times Hundred Waters at Mercury Lounge.

Hundred Waters, a band from Gainesville, Fla., started its CMJ set on Wednesday night at the Mercury Lounge with more than two minutes of a sustained drone holding improvisations within itself: a watercolor wash of possibilities, a suspension of time, an embrace of textural experiment and open-ended expectations.

Hundred Waters lets its songs free-associate and evolve: hand-played with virtuoso complexities at times, looping electronically at others. Its two singers are women, whose blend or overlap can evoke Stereolab, while the band's usual lead singer, Nicole Miglis, has clearly heard the more childlike side of Björk. Bu t Hundred Waters's own art-rock is rhapsodic and mercurial: pointillistic or gauzy, meditative or dramatic, near-jazzy or quasi-classical, a percussion workout or a rock processional. Although the songs tended to stretch onstage, they were rarely jams; their patterns coalesced, dissolved and transmuted into new patterns, taking their time but always headed somewhere fascinating. The conundrums in the lyrics could wait - the band's album, “Hundred Waters,” starts with a setting of a Shelley sonnet - as each song followed its own labyrinthine path.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 18, 2012

An earlier version of this post misspelled the surname of the Hundred Waters lead singer. She is Nicole Miglis, not Moglis.