Anyone who has ever played in a band has faced this apparently innocuous question numerous times, but with Miriodor it can trigger an endless stream of interrogations, discussions, arguments and soul-searching. Virtually all bands that play instrumental music put a heavy emphasis on improvisation, but this is clearly not our case. Even though our records sometimes end up in the "contemporary jazz" section at various stores, our stuff clearly hasn't got much to do with Ornette Coleman or Gonzalo Rubalcaba. We've also been linked to various progressive rock and R.I.O. bands, but then again we feel this filiation is only partial. Other people think of what we do as "experimental music", but, as Varèse might have put it, once we play it, we're not experimenting anymore. Most Miriodor compositions are painstakingly assembled and taken apart numerous times before reaching their final version, but once this critical stage is achieved, they don't change much. So, what kind of music is this, anyway?

Let's put it bluntly: we haven't got a clue. We have one hell of a good time trying to make these pieces sound as exhilirating, zany, wickedly contrapuntal, rhythmically hair-raising and harmonically deviant as possible, and we hope you can have just as much fun listening to them as we have playing them, but we still don't know what to call them. On a long minivan ride from Ann Arbor to Chicago, bass player Nicolas Masino came up with this description of what we try to do: "rock-oriented post-modern chamber music, with definite humorous overtones". We all think he stayed in school far too long.