From either direction, Sukpatch’s “Tie Down That Shiny Wave” — the band’s first for the Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal label — is a boundless pleasure thanks to its allegiance to both camps. Breezy as only an 18-minute EP can be, it may be this fall’s best summer record.

Tape-loop and beat literate, Chris Heidman and Steve Cruze know their way around trip-hop’s lethargic come-hither nature. But their sounds have a kitchen sink-type charm that recasts that style’s darkly suggestive pull as a playfully innocuous tug. Sukpatch is more concerned with pop music’s ephemeral levity than with electronic music’s tendency toward purposeful precision.

The EP’s first track, “Stuck on Me,” moves into its chorus in no less than 10 seconds. And what a chorus it is — a casual, whistling-ready melody that wouldn’t sound alien on a Hanson album. “One Sign Divine” follows, floating in the thick wake of an analog synthesizer. The simple four-chord synth progression is intercut with breakbeats, but not the eerily scattered breakbeats of drum ‘n’ bass. Instead, Sukpatch’s rhythms are delightfully jaunty, tossed off casually like fingers drumming on a notebook.

A looped soul-guitar rhythm on “Burnt Buy” moves Sukpatch directly into the Beck territory they lurk around throughout the record. And it’s a nice fit, as they share a similar willful goofiness, or at least a similar wink-and-nod of knowing irreverence. Witness the lead guitar line on “Darline Hay,” evoking Paul Young’s campily sap-drenched ’80s tune “Every Time You Go Away.” Intentional or not, the allusion’s giddy sensibility, like Sukpatch’s, is unmistakable.

This is not to say “I Am the Greatest” — a recording of Clay in a staged nightclub setting in his pre-champ days in 1963 — is anything less than invaluable. On the contrary, it serves to set up the historical drama in Clay’s shift into Ali, into a harbinger of celebratory blackness both of and distinctly before its time. This drama — not the fighter’s quick hands and impeccable footwork — is what inspired George Plimpton and Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe to wave their New Journalistic pens at Ali and examine the fighter as a pop icon equal parts athletics, entertainment, politics and spirituality. The same drama is what prompted millions to look upon Ali as a prophet, marveling at his
audacity.

When “I Am the Greatest” was released, Clay was just a boxer and,
to many, a bit of a clown. Nobody actually believed he would beat Sonny Liston in the 1964 heavyweight championship bout that is the subject of much of the spoken-word album. By all accounts, Clay should have lost and then faded into a dated memory of his loud mouth and self-proclaimed good looks. (And “I Am the Greatest” would not have been pulled from vinyl-only obscurity almost 36 years after its initial release.) For all his talk of declaring Liston’s jaw “a disaster area,” even Clay had doubts. Instead he won, forcing Liston to voluntarily bow out between rounds in a storybook finish to Clay’s princely arrival as a champ and a hero.

Did Liston listen to “I Am the Greatest” before the fight? If so, he must have been beguiled. On one hand, there was Clay, an expert in twisted psychology. His tireless, almost mantric, dismissal of Liston’s foreboding legend is effective, if only for its determination. On the other hand, Clay was a comic, a joker out for a few laughs and the flattering glare of the spotlight, convincing the world — and himself — that he was the greatest. Even more impressive was his ability to turn such a declaration in on itself and proscribe it as a consciously comic stance, winkingly exposing its absurd grandiosity. By relying on self-deprecation, he made such a self-appreciating claim all the more indisputable. In a way, the record shows Clay both as the Trojan Horse and the war-hungry soldiers within it.

Such a reading makes “I Am the Greatest” an interesting album. The sounds on the record itself, however, do not. In short order, the album consists of spoken-word bits and mock dramas delivered over orchestration that would be at home in a Borscht Belt night club. Of course, Clay was spewing beautiful bits of poetry. “Here I predict Mr. Liston’s dismemberment. I’ll hit him so hard he’ll wonder where October and November went,” he says. Clay hadn’t yet acquired the pure poetic genius he would make his own. There are no lines quite as good as “I have rassled with an alligator/I done tossled with a whale/I done locked up lightning/And thrown thunder in jail,” delivered in “When We Were Kings,” the magnificent documentary of his 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle.” But he’s sparring with words, no doubt.

And for anyone wondering if Clay could sing like he could sting, among the disc’s bonus tracks is a straight rendering of “Stand by Me,” melody and all, and an original go-go number, “The Gang’s All Here.” He didn’t quite have the voice of an angel, but then an angel couldn’t have dropped Liston. “I Am the Greatest” may not be the greatest album, but as part of the historical record, it puts up a doozy of a fight.

Using an extended shortwave radio scanning device, Scanner, or Robin Rimbaud, mines the ceaseless airborne signals of cell phones, fax machines, microwave ovens, urban power grids, police communication channels, satellite transmissions and the like for sounds ranging from human voices to oddly musical tones and crackles. In his work, these sounds act as phantom reminders of electronic music’s alienness. “I like the impermanence of these sounds,” Rimbaud says, as a park-goer strolled by with a handheld radio, seemingly on cue. “There’s a magical quality to it. It’s almost like … hearing ghosts.”

Rimbaud bought his first scanner as a teenager from a friend. He is profoundly British, so his telling of the story involves issues of class: His friend was a rowdy lad — a saboteur, Rimbaud teases — who made sport of disturbing upper-class fox hunters clad in stately red and white and perched atop horseback and lofty social constructs. His friend used the scanner to out-fox the police by intercepting their communications and fleeing accordingly when they were called to the scene. Such use was at least related to the machine’s intended function. In Rimbaud’s hands, however, the device became something else altogether.

In the 1950s, experimental musician and theorist John Cage wrote somewhat cryptically, “Mostly, right now, there is painting and sculpture, and just as formerly when starting to be abstract, artists referred to musical practices to show that what they were doing was valid, so nowadays, musicians, to explain what they are doing, say, ‘See, the painters and sculptors have been doing it for quite some time.’”

The ’50s are long gone. When it comes to art forms addressing technology as a subject, music is back on top. By using the actual sounds of technology, Rimbaud injects himself under its silver skin, mapping its obscured nerve endings and exposing otherwise private forms of communication in ways visual art never could. Scanner albums, including the recent “Lauwarm Instrumentals” (Sulphur Records/Beggars Banquet), have beats. But his more fittingly fleeting public works — BBC radio plays, countless art installations, a recent sound-design commission for a new digital wing at the Science Museum in London — are snatches of an environment, both physically and metaphysically.

“I find it quite intriguing, the way we approach sound now,” Rimbaud says. “Think of the Walkman: When it first came around in the late ’70s, if you listened to music you listened at home in your bedroom, or at a concert. Nowadays we use sound a lot of times to avoid situations. I wear a Walkman on the train to avoid talking to other people, to pass the time of the journey. You listen to a radio in the car to block out the sound of the car’s motion.”

It’s fitting that a man more fascinated by the sound of engines than by the FM station drowning them out would make music explicitly about the act of listening. He first made a name for himself as Scanner by manipulating bits of sampled phone calls plucked out of less than thin air. His scanning device allows him to pick up what he lovingly calls “sonic debris” in real time within a one-mile radius of the machine. As a former student of literature, he uses these snippets of conversation, oftentimes one-sided, as a blank narrative construct to which we almost instinctively attach a narrative arc.

“There’s a great term, ‘repaired indexicality,’ which sociologists use for replies to unasked questions, where people repair a thought,” he says. “It’s a phrase I like to apply to sound. If you take beats and cut them up so there’s nothing where the next beat should fall, you repair it in your head automatically. You know where it should go. That’s what happens with the telephone calls. If you can’t hear what the other person is saying, you repair the conversation.”

It’s nearly impossible to hear, as listeners at a recent Scanner concert at the Knitting Factory in New York did, a digital voice intone, “You have 100 voice-mail messages” and not wonder a thing or two about the caller on the other end. Where has this person been? Is everything all right? These disconnected voices, caught literally and figuratively in between stations, command a conflicted human response despite the fact that they’re just sonic antimatter. The messages suggest Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: The closer we get to them, the more constructed our narratives become, the more likely they are to slip out of our hands. Take, for example, Rimbaud’s description of a phone call sampled on the first Scanner record:

I found a man talking to a woman, and he starts off saying, “How are you?”

She replies, “Oh, I’ve had a nice, easy day today. I’m just watching the movie channel. I have some tickets to see a concert tonight.”

It goes on like this for quite a while and I’m imagining this nice boyfriend and girlfriend couple talking after work. Then all of a sudden the man says, “Well, are you sexy? What have you got on?” And in a very cool way, so he must have done this quite a few times before. The reality of the narrative you’re constructing this way is constantly changing. And it’s happening in real time all around you.

There’s a certain sense of dread surrounding Scanner’s methods. By accessing spaces traditionally considered private, his work evokes questions about piracy and motives and intent. And the alien electronic undercurrent to it all isn’t exactly soothing. At a show in New York last year, Rimbaud said he quickly turned the channel when he realized he was broadcasting a discussion of funeral arrangements to an entire audience. His methods certainly are voyeuristic in nature, and potentially illegal, and his sounds are a far cry from sweet soul music. Rimbaud acknowledges this, but he also speaks romantically about the subtle subversion in using technology as a creative means.

“These questions are important to ask. Freedom of information is an important issue outside music that the work touches on,” he said. “And it suggests the vulnerability of these kinds of systems, of technology. You’d like to think as technology continues to develop, it would be more secure, when in fact, it just gets easier to break into. And my work plays into that. The important thing is that we’re allowed access to these tools that watch us and listen to us, that acknowledge who we are. It’s when they’re held in the power of somebody else that they can be quite scary.”

While the blood that pumped from Smith’s collection briefly turned to mercury in the veins of a world-changing Bob Dylan, in Fahey’s system it remained as rust. The rust that coursed through his guitar-picking fingers was the same rust that cursed the woefully un-Reconstruct-ed Mississippi Delta of blues greats like Charlie Patton (the subject of his college dissertation). The rust is what let him channel the revisionist suggestions attached to this old music while still, like Dylan, transforming it with touches of his time’s post-historic tendencies.

Musically speaking, there are guitar players, and then there is John Fahey. Six steel strings seldom sound so symphonic as when strummed by his hand. It is impossible to ignore notions of psychedelia on “Best of the Vanguard Sessions,” a compilation of tracks from his “Requia” and “The Yellow Princess” albums from 1967 and 1968, respectively. Recorded for the venerable folk label in between records for his own, independent Takoma imprint, these albums show Fahey coyly toying with musiqui concrete collage techniques and summoning impossibly dense swirls of sound from a lone acoustic guitar. What makes it hard to respectfully call Fahey’s music psychedelic, though, is the fact that he’s using a language mostly derived from old 78s by blues and country folks like his beloved Skip James and the Carter Family. Fahey’s are sounds of time-tested sincerity, not stylization.

“The Vanguard Years” works as an adequate, though limited, introduction to John Fahey. Songs like “Lion” and “Irish Setter” show him shifting between jumpy celebration and sparse, restrained meditation. On “Dance of the Inhabitants of the Invisible City of Bladensburg” he crafts a melody so stunning, he sounds more like an orchestra than a soloist. On all the songs, his acoustic guitar is divorced from the stock reactions it evokes. His music is folk music, no doubt, but a brand of folk music that may deserve another name. God help those who try to name it, though. He makes this divergence explicit on “The Singing Bridge of Memphis, Tennessee,” a cut-up piece of found sounds, some of which come from wind and cars “playing” the title’s subject. And on the ingeniously titled “When the Catfish Is in Bloom,” a nearly eight-minute number that strays miles from its core melody before precociously reeling itself back in.

Through all his endless wandering, Fahey finds chords so beautiful that they make your stomach drop. They always come at perfect times, in between uncommonly complex folk-musical walks through desolate train yards, moonshine hoe-downs and mosquito-filled nights. His music can be placed neatly within an indigenous folk tradition, but also alongside the most carefully considered examples of harmony’s inherent power. As a great folk-song writer, Fahey was a great composer.

“Paintin’ the Town Brown,” on the other hand, is a straightforward picture of the band translating their freebasing vaudeville act to the stage from 1990 to 1998. Some of the cuts are masterpieces; some are most definitely pieces. Separating them, though, is never uninteresting. There’s a peculiar joy in trying to decide whether the arena-rock “Chariots of Fire” outro tacked onto the end of “Japanese Cowboy” — and rendered by the bolo-tie-spirited Nashville studio cats — is brilliant collage or utter garbage.

Of course, that might not be much fun for someone unfamiliar with Ween’s act, and that’s the glaring weakness of “Paintin’.” As goofy as Ween can be on their albums, their studio recordings are not all sophomoric rock ‘n’ roll cartoons. Expertly encrusted with warped-tape vocals, home-cooked electronics and clever guitar designs, records like “Pure Guava” and “The Mollusk” display a studio know-how that transcends the average 8-tracker’s scratchy bedroom musings. The same goes for the songs. On record, undeniably smart mystical moods break up seventh-grade bathroom-wall poetry. Only the most consciously arrested would have the patience to sit through them otherwise.

Onstage, Ween strikes no such balance. Instead, the band inexplicably leans toward warped hard rock and metal. That gives “Paintin’” some highlights, like the quick strike of “Cover It With Gas,” but makes a mockery of a song like “Tender Situation,” which, on “Pure Guava” at least, was aptly titled.

The entire set isn’t lost. On “Mr. Please Help My Pony,” Ween manage to sound like they’re bleeding off melting reel-to-reel tape. But Disc 2, anchored by two huge heaps of minced noise and a 26-minute barrage of loopy lysergic noise called “Poop Ship Destroyer,” is something else altogether. In the liner notes written about that song, if not on the song itself, Dean Ween finally makes his most convincing argument for live recordings. “If we get money someday,” he writes, “we want to get two big cannons that spray diarrhea on the crowd … We’ve been talking about it for years.”