Jeremy Boyle may rope in an audience that includes a lot more than the expected indie-rock spectrum with his new solo album, "Songs from the Guitar Solos." A quick scan through the record's six selections reveals a side of Boyle the majority of the horn-rimmed masses may not have seen coming: "Kiss," "Van Halen," "AC/DC" and, perhaps most surprisingly, "Sabbath."

But not to worry, gentle readers: Boyle's not cashed in on the current hard-rock craze and made an album of Tight Bros-like paeans to smokes and Saturday nights; he's made one that looks at those paeans through the looking glass.

"Songs..." takes as its source tiny samples of guitar solos by some of the 1970s' most prominent axe-wielders. The new audience the Joan of Arc member may woo with the record is the electronic and classical music communities, for "Songs..." is a beautiful collection of ambient guitar works that reconsiders the instrument in ways not usually heard in the underground-rock world.

The work is a musically, culturally and politically complex one, encircling issues of artistic ownership, author's intent and the possibly inherent masculinity of rock and roll. Boyle recently told Rocket Fuel all about it.

Rocket Fuel: This record is one that's certainly rooted in a conceptual foundation. How'd you hatch the idea to do it?

Jeremy Boyle: I was thinking about the ideas of performance and popular music and the idea of the visual and the theatrics. I started thinking about the guitar solo as a signifier and what it had come to be. It was sort of interesting to think about that in the era of the 1970s and then look at the other end of what was going on; you had that sort of aesthetic as a signifier in popular culture and then you would look at art and other music that was going on -- minimalism was happening. I thought it was just interesting to put those two things together and kind of work them in.

RF: In the written explanation that accompanies the record, you write that "the goal of each song is nearly absolute transformation: the aggressive, theatrical, masculine nature of the guitar solo enters into this journey to reach a nearly antithetical existence." Was it an attempt to create something out of a something where the new something didn't previously exist?

JB: Yes, yes, yes, right there (laughs).

RF: What's your musical background? If you were left to make the music that totally suited you absolutely, would it sound more like this or more like Joan of Arc?

JB: It's probably more something like this. Whenever I'm working with other people, there's sort of a filter on things and things kind of come into other contexts. I've never been necessarily a good player in any kind of technical aspect, and from the start of me playing music, I had started playing around with electronics and broken distortion pedals and started playing with those things in some ways to make up for what I couldn't do. I've always sort of approached things with that idea, as finding some other way.

What you've heard of things I've done before has been in the context of Joan of Arc, and I think that some of the thought processes and the approaches to the sounds I'm making in each project are really similar. This music is taken without the construct of the rock band and all those other things; it's these things that were before accents existing without another structure. They're on their own.

RF: One of the things I find interesting about Joan of Arc, as with your record, is the idea that there's a conceptual base to the band, that there's more there than perhaps meets the eye. It seems like that's something that's happening a lot in underground music right now.

JB: I agree. I think that that's probably something that's always going on and it'll always go on. It's tough not to be conscious of where you fit into what's going on in a larger dialogue, whether you want to or not. Sometimes maybe what you're trying to do is just not be conscious of it and not comment on it, but you still are in a sense.

I think it's really hard for someone to not be aware of the politics of the music that you're playing and of its history. And it seems that right now it probably stands out because the audience of what is called "independent music" has certainly expanded and the distinction between what is independent music as a style versus what is mainstream music as a style is blurred. I think those distinctions aren't so clear, so I think it's hard to not be conscious of those things.

RF: I've always thought it strange, albeit in a good way, on some level that a band like Joan of Arc puts out records on Jade Tree, a label perhaps better known for, say, less thoughtful bands, like the Promise Ring or Kid Dynamite. Which makes me think about the idea of music being appreciable on more than one level, as an object to be appreciated by more than one audience or from more than one perspective. Is that something you consider, with both projects?

JB: Yes. I have a hard time approaching something without thinking about the issues that I guess you could call the concept. I think, for me, in order for it to exist, it needs to have some sort of foundation in a concept, but for it to be successful it would need to be able to exist with its own self, too -- it is enough of a music in itself that it's able to go beyond where it came from and be something of its own.

But I feel that's something for me to overcome a lot of times, being stuck with feeling too conscious of the idea and not being able to proceed without feeling like I have a grasp on it. I think it's something to balance, and I think it's problematic when something is slanted completely the other way, where it is only concept. Especially in something like music. There is a balance to be found and I think it's difficult to reach that.

RF: Something I think about a lot as both an artist and a spectator is the space between the two roles and what happens to artistic intent within that space. Like, the idea that the spectator doesn't necessarily always receive or comprehend the full intent of the artist in his or her interaction with an art object, and whether or not that's a bad thing. I think with your record that idea really comes into play. If someone heard it and said, "Oh, this is really nice background music," what would be your reply?

JB: That goes back into the idea that it needs to be able to exist simply with what it is as music. I would be very comfortable with that; I would enjoy if it would just be considered as nice background music. I agree that I feel like that's a struggle a lot of times personally, thinking about the way in which what I do is going to be situated and read and so forth. You obviously bring something to the listener for them to take something away, but it's interesting to think about what the differences are in what can be taken away versus what you've given them.

RF: In something like this it seems like the issue may be thornier than elsewhere, because the concept is perhaps more essential or significant than in other instances. For example, part of what I like about your record is the idea of making background music out of its total opposite, which is something you don't get if you're not aware of the methodology involved in its making.

JB: For that to happen, though, is sort of giving some sort of credence to what it is. Because then, instead of just existing in a conceptual or theoretical nature as an antithesis, it really is. It really is acting opposite of what it really is without someone talking about the details of what's really going on.

RF: Another thing I like about the record is that I think it pretty healthily subverts expectations of what is or is not underground, youth-oriented music.

JB: It doesn't necessarily take the form that other music, the more typical formats of independent rock or whatever, takes, but it's sort of coming from all the same places and it's really in a sense doing the same things as that music does. Just as a lot of indie rock is sort of about rock, this is just as much about rock. I think in that way it's just as much a rock record, because so much of rock music is about rock music and about this whole thing, and this record is really about all those things, too, although it sort of feels different.

RF: I think it's an important thing for people, specifically maybe people who aren't involved in the scene, to realize that work like this can come out of the underground. Have you ever felt restrained by the idea of the institution of underground music and its attendant politics? Have you ever felt that there's a set of limitations at work within the venue?

JB: I think there's a limitation in the sense that whenever you're making music that's in this underground, so much of what it is and the way people are going to hear it and the way you're making it and what you're hearing is not simply based on the way you perceive sound as a pure form. The way you perceive it has a lot to do with what you know about this form of music already. So I think in that sense it's limiting, in the way that it's very rarely able to be about music and the physiological process of hearing. Its perception is really based in what I'd say is almost a linguistic sense -- what you know of this language of music. I think that it's really hard for someone to escape that and really explore sound as sound or whatever -- sound as an independent language within the framework of the underground-music scene -- because you always have the politics of underground music and this history of music up to this point and what is taken into account and all those sorts of things.

RF: That notion of approaching the record as an exercise in pure sound kind of goes back to the idea of intent, in that it can be examined as simply that, or, like we've said, the concept behind it can be examined, too. On which level do you find yourself assessing the record most vigilantly: as a conceptual-art project or as an exercise in pure sound?

JB: I would say that I can even go back into the process of making it. It was such an insanely tedious thing. The whole thing comes from well less than 10 seconds of material. Some of the songs on the record are maybe 10 minutes long and are made from 1.3 seconds total of sound, stretched and overlapped to make that time.

There was so much time involved in exploring and making something from it. The entire time that I was working on it, immersed in it, trying to make this music as a sound, I never once would give a consideration to where it came from. That was always something that I would think about when I was outside of it, and that carries on now. When I'm listening to it, I'm never thinking about its source, where it came from, necessarily. That's something I think about afterwards, whenever I'm not engaged in the actual process of listening.

RF: That highlights an issue that seems to saturate a lot of contemporary art: this idea of retroactive intent -- making an art object, looking back on it and assigning a meaning to it after the creative process has been completed.

JB: I think that that's a very valid idea, because you may approach something with a particular intention and you may have things pretty well thought-out as far as you can tell, but as you work there's that feeling that something's right or something's not right. I think that the way your head works on a subconscious level, it's putting together more than you're able to understand. I think we as people are able to process information and put together ideas based on all this information and not be able to see through it really structurally, like figure out where everything comes from and how everything plays a role and where all the meaning comes from.

So I think that working through art or music or whatever, you will kind of come to your concept afterwards; whenever you see it or whenever you hear it and it's there and it actually exists, you can kind of start at that point to just bring to your consciousness some of the things that happened subconsciously, some of the information that you were processing and putting together in your subconscious. Because now it exists, so I think you're really able to identify where things came from.

On the flip side, I think that a lot of times it's pushed too much and meanings are forced onto things where they really don't exist, and that's problematic. But I think that a lot of times you really, truly can make discoveries through making.