This semimythical Ann Arbor, Michiganbased group was formed in the mid-1970s by three brothers, Benjamin, Laurence and Roger Miller, whose musical roots were entwined around early avant rock, freeform improvisation and 20th century classical music.

The trio were active in 1967, performing covers by such underground rock legends as the 13th Floor Elevators and the Mothers of Invention. This was soon to be followed by the formation of quartet Sproton Layer, who in 1970 recorded an album called With Magnetic Fields Disrupted that would eventually be released by German label World In Sound in 2012.

Through witnessing concerts by proto-punk rock/metal revolutionaries the MC5, German electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and, a few years later, attending John Sinclair’s Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival, the relevant musical building blocks for their next project were slid into place and The Fourth World Quartet was born. This time they were joined by alto saxophonist Jack Waterstone, who played alongside Benjamin and Laurence in the wind section, while Roger Miller (whose musical interests included Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky) played piano and added percussion to the proceedings.

The resulting series of improvised jam sessions, collected here for the first time, reveal how the amalgam of volatile styles the brothers ingested during their various sonic encounters fused together and caught fire. Kicking off with the loping ‘Reverse Coil Distinction’, the set shifts towards Roger’s more complex “The Transformation Of Oz” with its forays into Zappa styled composition – where psychedelic rock motifs and clusters of modern composition collide and bounce off each other. Elsewhere Waterstone’s ‘Journey To Bubbleland' prises open the lid on a Braxton-esque can of musical worms and lets the contents wriggle free. Fired up with a salvo of horns and detailed with piano string strum, the piece is one of the album's highlights. Equally enjoyable is ‘Winter's Dream’, that sounds like the soundtrack to an imaginary animated cartoon featuring characters that probably resemble the Exquisite Corpse drawings in the CD's accompanying booklet. 1975 closes on a fantastical note with Roger's arrangement of the main theme from Stravinsky's ‘Renard The Fox’, an eccentric percussion led march that briskly gathers pace and could easily be mistaken as being a fragment from some lost songbook by Moondog. Although The Fourth World Quartet was a short-lived project, this remarkable discovery reveals a group who were knocking over some serious creative barriers.