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Philip E. Karnats recorded his Pleasesuite in his Sangreasy suite, “a one-room basement studio/apartment/foxhole in Chicago,” and it shows.

The song cycle reflects the kind of strange wizardry that can be born of cabin fever in a cold, dark, small place. Karnats says he organized the album’s 14 songs into a progression with “low being mellow, slow, sad, etc., and high being excited, aggressive, angry, etc.” Such highs and lows were added and subtracted until he had “a pleasing curve, or what appeared to be a natural progression. Abstract? Maybe. Horseshit? Maybe. But coming from an obsessive asshole, it works.”

The album does reflect an obsessive creation. It’s an emotional song cycle that holds together pieces of art rock, guitar rock, glam rock, electronica and power pop.

So who’s Philip E. Karnats?

Underground rock fans in Dallas might have heard him in the mid-‘90s. He left Chicago for Dallas in 1995 to join the band Bobgoblin, which he describes as “very tight, kind of Buzzcocks meets Devo . . . but stricter. It was cool stuff, but (we) weren’t really a good match, like fois gras at a PETA banquet. I’m more of a feel player and they were looking for a programmable machine.” There was a stint with 1919 Summit, a band that also included Josh Garza (Secret Machines), Kris Wheat (Bedhead) and Richard Paul (Rubberbullet). “Some moments of greatness,” Karnats says, “but under realized, doomed by conflicting personalities and a powerful drug habit or two.”

That brought him to Tripping Daisy in 1997. He toured with the band that year and played on its sadly underheard psych-rock opus Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb. “(It was a) magical, one-time only experience which I think still lives and breathes within everyone involved,” he says. “And I’m not one to get too wishy washy … I take that back, yes I am. (But) it was really a collective passion for pushing the envelop which has grown and evolved into some great things (like the) Polyphonic Spree, Secret Machines, and now happily Pleasesuite.”

Atom Bomb’s big, broad canvas is definitely reflected in Karnats’ solo debut, a beautifully sprawling piece of conceptual rock, created largely by Karnats himself “tapping, plucking, fondling, rubbing, hugging guitars, various keyboards, noise makers, etc.”

He’s easy to picture as a mad scientist bouncing off the walls of that small Chicago apartment after hours. “I’m definitely a night owl,” he says, “(and) my studio walls are covered from head to tow in sharpie notes.”

Karnats also calls himself a “sucker for concept and melding multiple ideas into a grander schematic,” which explains the marriage of three-chord guitar pop of Early Bird Cartoons, the ethereal experiment of Smoke and Sediment and the Kraut-rock tinged Sue Blue in his suite. And one listen to Sick of Walkin’ and it’s clear that Karnats fell under the spell of Bolan-mania.

He blames his father, who initiated his first musical memory. “I was probably about four . . . my dad and his drunken sidekick, Merv, were testing the limits on his booming new stereo with Are You Experienced?’ by Hendrix. The sound of the backwards guitar and drums were unexplainably profound to me at the time, still today actually. My second memory was my parents then getting into a fight about the volume and me having to spend the evening in my room so that my little virgin ears would be protected.”

Not surprisingly, listening to Pleasesuite, punk, art rock, psychedelic rock (“and psychedelics”) and jazz also soon took hold.

In a way, Karnats’ Pleasesuite is a reaction to the restrictive nature of making and releasing music. Given a canvas, he’s chosen to fill it with aplomb, seeing out a vision that’s entirely his own. So the 14 songs here certainly can be pulled from the larger whole, but in sequence they’re quite a ride.

“If you’re considered a rock band, you’re expected to rock out all the time,” Karnats says. “If you’re inherently mellow, you’re expected to maintain that mood all the time. If you’re a country rap band you’re expected to do rap country tunes all day and nothing else.

“It’s tough to balance, especially with today’s chronic short attention span loud, abrasive songs and quiet, ethereal songs. These days it’s a curse, if you’re too far one way it’s hard to turn the other. It makes for a perfect breeding ground, though, a Petri dish for all the middle of the road shit that we’re force fed on a daily basis. It really gets my goat.”

So Karnats offers his Pleasesuite, an album of interwoven extremes. The shifts in mood are hardly jarring, they just reflect the good and bad of any day, week, month, etc. It’s a natural progression that finds something real and human and expresses it in the way Karnats knows best: through making music without restrictions.

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