Town And Country was a quartet of valiant musicians from Chicago's jazz and post-rock underground: guitarist Ben Vida (the brother of US Maple's Adam Veda), keyboardist Jim Dorling, bassist Liz Payne and pianist Joshua Abrams. The all-instrumental and drum-less album Town And Country (BOXmedia, 1998) introduced their quiet and austere art of sprawling experiments with an average duration of twelve minutes. There is none of rock music's bombast here: this is music for sophisticated ears and attentive brains. The nine-minute The Loam Hazard is de facto a guitar solo of quiet and derelict repetition that ends with the most cryptic of codas. The hermetic dialogue between minimalist repetition of guitar chords and drones of keyboards in the 17-minute Crossings creates a transcendent atmosphere that breaks down only after ten minutes when the guitar begins limping and the organ begins wavering. The music implodes and the last five minutes are a barely whispered adagio. This is closer to classical chamber music than to post-rock. The trumpet melody of the nine-minute And See slowly arises around a slow pulsation of accordion-like tones in what is possibly the most intriguing combination of the album. The guitar's ticking opens the 21-minute So That I May Come Back at a funereal pace and it takes more than ten minutes before a harmonium-like drone drowns it and causes the guitar to intone a more serene meditation.

The EP Decoration Day (Thrill Jockey, 1999) adds the eight-minute Off Season, which offers a lot more movement around a slightly jazzy piano pattern, and especially the nine-minute Give Your Baby a Standing Ovation, whose piano and guitar interplay evokes a malfunctioning music-box or ticking clock until a loud harmonium drone turns it into a neurotic experience.

Straddling the line between jazz improvisation and classical composition, and availing themselves of acoustic instruments such as piano, guitar, trumpet, contrabass, harmonium, the four lengthy tracks of It All Has To Do With It (Thrill Jockey, 2000) emanate the same hypnotic bliss of Harold Budd's early music. For about six minutes, Hindenburg is a modest interplay of sparkling piano notes, waltzing violin and somnolent guitars, but then guitar and harmonium start an anemic slow-motion dance with discrete counterpoint of cello and piano. The stately Hat Versus Hood is influenced by 20th-century classical avantgarde and in particular by the minimalist school, combining agonizing drones and limping repetition. Fine Italian Hand is tiptoeing chamber music that slowly incorporates a bit of percussion, and ends in a minute of collective dejection. The 15-minute That Old Feeling is the ultimate minimalist piece: a stubborn repetition of some trivial chords over a distorted harmonium drone that after nine minutes gets disrupted by a mellow trumpet melody. Ben Vida plays guitar, accordian, trumpet, and bells. Liz Payne plays contrabass, celeste, piano, acoustic guitar, and bells; Josh Abrams plays contrabass, celeste, mbira, snare drum, and vibes; Jim Dorling plays harmonium, celeste and bells. And all of them also played bowed bowls.

The seven songs on C'mon (Thrill Jockey, 2002) are a little more humane and permeable. The piano carillon in the eight-minute Going to Kamakura exudes both a nostalgic and a gothic spirit. The feverish percussive repetition of the seven-minute I'm Appealing evokes minimalist guru Terry Riley. The eight-minute The Bells (with Vida on cornet) weds Bill Evans' romantic jazz and Anthony Braxton's algorithmic post-jazz. New life is injected in their process also by the sprightly folk-ish guitar pattern of the eight-minute Bookmobile, with the other instruments joining in an unusually lively collective dance. It's minimalism with verve. The shorter pieces (Garden, I am so Very Cold, Palms) are impressionistic jazz vignettes.

The group continued the progression towards a jazzier and less abstract format on 5 (Thrill Jockey, 2003). Ben Vida mostly switches from guitar to cornet, Dorling focuses more as much on bass clarinet as on harmonium, Payne's hand chimes are more prominent, and Abrams indulges in the celeste and the viola. Trumpet and harmonium erect a wall of sound in Sleeping in the Midday Sun (10:11) that after five minutes gets demolished by frantic percussion. The pulsation that drives Shirtless (11:04) is clearly derivative of Steve Reich and the hand chimes do little to upgrade it. For something completely different, the insistent droning of Nonstop Dancer (9:19) ends in a funereal atmosphere, and Old Fashioned feels like its natural appendix/coda. Despite the expanding instrumentation, with the infinite combinations of timbre that it would allow, the interplay is still somewhat limited and the group fails to transcend the obvious limitations of their format. The most promising moment comes with the shorter piece: the ebullient jazz bacchanal of Lifestyled. This album feels like superficial compared with the previous efforts.

Vida and Payne also play in Pillow.

Bird Show is Ben Vida's solo project.

Town And Country's Up Above (2006) has little in common with its predecessors, possibly because Vida's new passion for world-music dominates the proceedings. The most obvious difference is in the duration of the pieces: only two exceed the six-minute mark. Its compositions are heavily influenced by ethnic folk music while retaining foundations of minimalism. Sun Trolley explores three different kinds of minimalist repetition while indulging in the timbres of exotic instruments. Phoney Fuckin Mountain is four minutes of ecstatic dancing with shamanic vocals. The droning vocals permeate King of Portugal over a sitar-like distortion and delicate drumming. The nine-minute Up Above (the standout) is a disorienting symphony of chaotic percussion and drones, fueled by sinister supernatural forces that decays into a dissonant, shapeless contortion. The album represents a dramatic change of perspective for Town And Country's mission.