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Lou Reed is temporarily returning to explore his mid-70's "Metal Machine Music" avante-gard roots, famously taped down for posterity in an infamous double-LP: Loe Reed's Group PLays at the Blender Theater

It was good to have this Lou Reed back: not an American Master nor a Legend of Rock, but a barking, brooding, beneficial irritant. On Thursday night at the Blender Theater at Gramercy, onstage between Sarth Calhoun and Ulrich Krieger, two much younger musicians, he was making noise — improvised, loud, heavily processed, and some of it ugly enough to make people leave

Although critics delight in calling MMM "noise," it is really of a piece with Brian Eno and David Bowie's contemporaneous ambient explorations. In Reed's, case MMM was a return to a sound he had pioneered as far back as 1966 with the Velvet Underground. That is, while the Beatles were going on about "Lovely Rita, Meter Maid," Lou was already making these sorts of droning doom-laden sounds.

Still, while Reed is due all praise for advanced thinking, the original MMM is hardly the outrageous break that its proponents believe it was. Although Reed was a middling pop star, he was also known at the time as the epitome of punk based avant-cool. Surely, Pat Metheney's "Zero Tolerance for Silence" from 1991 is a much more radical piece, given than Metheney had previously (and subsequently) shown little regard for extreme noise as a stylistic cue.

Reed, on the other hand, has always had his propensity for crazed sounds in the back of his (and his fans') minds. MMM and its occasional revivals (there was also a flurry of interest when it was released in CD) is as much a part of Reed's career as "Walk on the Wildside," although one that can be hard to fathom for his mainstream audience. Those of us who lurk in music's shadows, however, see this as the "real" Lou Reed, right along with his more hummable fare.