Gastr del Sol released *Camoufleur* in February 1998. It was the closing statement on an extraordinary five-year burst of music making, in the form of one of the best albums of that or any era. Drawing on Gastr's fascination with acoustics, David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke applied oblique influences of modern classical, avant-garde, tape music, world music, and space — lots of space — and embarked on a wholesale transformation with *Crookt, Crackt, or Fly*, the *Mirror Repair* EP, and the *Upgrade & Afterlife* album. Nothing prepared for each successive record, and yet *Camoufleur* managed to trump them all, presenting their (so-called) avant-garde explorations — which by that time also incorporated glitchy power-book electronics — as pop music.