AT their utmost Band of Susans make one of the most spiritual and uplifting rock sounds around.

"Hope Against Hope" remains the blueprint for their best 'songs'. Live, in a downtown New York club, it's even more ultimate than on vinyl. Three guitars cross-hatch incredible simple chords and sub-riffs over the same, narrow soundspace, creating an inchoate blaze of light, like a child scrawling manically over and over a piece of paper with fluorescent crayons. Band of Susans work furiously all for that moment of flashover when the song's superstructure is engulfed, lost in a borderless miasma of interference, a pall of cosmic tinnitus.

The problem for many listeners is that Band of Susans, like AR Kane and the most intelligent rock of the moment, depart from the customary ways we children of the music press 'read' rock. Instead of 'communication', Band of Susans offer something more like communion. The vocals and words are almost buried; as narratives (both lyrical and musical) their songs don't go anywhere, but by repetition alight into a pure ascension. The ideal state all these songs verge on is the instrumental - but maybe it's important that the words are half-heard, are seen to be obliterated.

Others will be troubled by the lack of charisma, but these are the people whose idea of 'presence', is a winsome doll backed by there leather-clad airheads. Sometimes Band of Susans are a radical vaporisation of 'presence', in the same way the metal of their riffs passes beyond white heat into a gaseous state. Sometimes they are just plain nondescript. Their debut LP, "Hope Against Hope" is divided evenly between celestial grey and New Wave grey.

BAND of Susans are Robert Poss (singer, guitarist and core member), Susan Stenger (bass), Susan Tallman (guitar), Susan Lyall (guitar) and Ron Spritzer (drums). So what united them?

Poss: "We all have an interest in a certain kind of guitar sound, a wall of guitars, distortion sound. Susan Stenger and I used to play with this guy called Reese Chatham, who used to work with Glenn Branca at one point, and he was interested in building up a wall of sound with guitars. But he did it in a very clean, un-rock way. What we do is quite different from his stuff: we have guitars that are over-amplified and we use a lot of distortion and feedback, to get all these overtones and harmonics.

"Some bands are interested in melodies and songs, and we are to a degree, but the real obsession is with getting this thick, impenetrable sound that's visceral and kinda transcendent. When I play stuff to friends I tell them to think of it spatially, three dimensionally…"

Presumably if it's not the academic appeal of the idea driving you, it must be a particular emotional effect of resonance that sound has?

"I just find that when I'm in the middle of the sound - recording, onstage - it's … exciting. There's nowhere else I'd wanna be. I mean, there is a particular emotional feel, but I'm not sure I can articulate it … There's just a different quality to the sound if you play open-tuning chords. You get a drone."

Stenger "'Hope Against Hope' is all on one E-chord. The movement in the song is all by shifting textures and layers, rather than any harmonic movement. I come from a downtown avant-garde scene and I was dealing with a lot of conceptual ideas then. But I enjoy realising them in a rock context much more than when I was playing flute in artspaces."

Because the audience don't have to be boned up on music theory to groove to what you're doing?

"That's partly it, but also just the pure sensual experience of loud guitar music - it's the greatest! It's like sex or something."

What are the precedents for what you do?

Poss: "Other people have done similar things, but never quite like we do. Like this Reese Chatham guy. But his angle was completely un-rock, anti-distortion. From him, we learnt that you can make a song, a band, a record, out of very, very simple parts. This is what interests us. Our songs, arrangements and sound are ostensibly very simple. The unique thing about Band of Susans is that although people have done this sort of thing before, they've never done it in the classic, rock format."

Stenger: "Also, we use a lot of consonance as opposed to dissonance, bands like Sonic Youth use. Unlike all those weird NYC guitar bands, we use mostly major chords, which has the effect of resolution and affirmation."

YEAH, a song like "Hope Against Hope" sounds like an endless series of crescendos, or emphatic, telling blows. The whole effect is to make the music sound triumphant. Whereas, I suppose, minor chords give an imitation of things falling apart, not resolving themselves, which is why they form the language of poignancy.

Poss: "We're way different from other New York downtown bands, a lot less self-conscious about what we do. There's a sound we go after: my lyrics are pretty sincere, NY bands are into this image thing, and go looking for heavy hitting imagery."

Stenger: " What we've done is take certain musical premises to their extremes. 'Hope Against Hope' was an attempt to see how much you can make of one chord."

This was done, not just by building layer upon layer, but by breaking open a chord to release a mini-universe of notes and molecules. Immerse yourself in its repetition, its unstinting refusal of narrative, and eventually you escape linear, sequential thought altogether reaching a true and total apprehension of The Moment.

"When I sit here by myself and work on stuff, I hook up all my amps and distortion units in my own special way, and I dunno, maybe I’m a simpleton or something - but I can sit there and listen to it for hours."

Lyall: "Robert, you’re a simpleton!"

Stenger: "Band of Simpletons!"

Ah well .. this brings me conveniently round to the observation that most intelligent rock today aims to induce a temporary idiocy, almost a vegetable state. But what are the politics of a rock culture based around achieving altered or blank, catatonic states of awareness? Rock used to believe it could improve the world, if not by direct incitement, at least by a project of edification and communication. Now, it seems to want to cretinise the listener, or at least render you out-of-it, out-of-action as regards intervention in the world.

"Rather than trying to get our minds blown, we’re trying to focus on very specific things. We’ve tried to get rid of all the superfluous stuff. It’s the difference between intelligence and cleverness. Get rid of the clever-clever stuff and hone in on the essential."

THE music sounds, as I say, triumphant, a celebration of itself. But - in a way that reminds me of the late Husker Du, Dinosaur and others - that sense of elevation is undercut by dejected, beleaguered words.

Poss: "I just think there’s a more complex emotion when there’s that juxtaposition or contradiction. Plus, if we had morose lyrics, and morose sound and morose stage manner, we’d be just another morose NYC hardcore band. The lyrics aren’t morose anyway, they’re about dreams and hopes and expectations that maybe get dashed, but you learn from that, and you still keep those dreams."

It sounds like it takes a lot of tight and urgent discipline to stir up the smog of distortion that’s your goal.

"Well, it is a purposeful noise, it’s not chaos. But there’s a lot of coincidence and chance in what we do. Everything is not predicted and worked out in advance."

BAND of Susans have found within their chosen limits infinite shades of grey. Also, this idea of focus and repetition can be almost meditational, transcendental. But how can their music develop?

Stenger: " I see endless possibilities. I have a million ideas. Although I guess ‘Hope Against Hope’ is a perfect song."

Six, seven years ago in New York and in London, eclecticism and white dance were the in-thing. So why the return to pure white noise and rock that roots you to the floor while in dances in your head?

"Because those things are fundamentally better. You’re right, there is a fundamental division between those whoa re eclectic and those who are monolithic. We’re the latter, but that one thing can be very DIVERSE. And being eclectic can just mean being a dilettante, jack of all trades and master of none."