Chris Burke enjoys his reputation as a groove terrorist. As one half of Kinetic/Sire duo Glorified Magnified, he has spent nearly ten years perfecting his ability to meld proper musicianship with rhythm swipes and loops that he has carfuly tweaked and twisted on computers. After a slew of indie releases under various monkers, Burke and collaboartor/brother Dan are poised to burst from their experimental base into the mainstream. For proof, bathe your body and mind in their refreshingly unusual EP, "All Wave Super."

Preconceived notions or superficial listening may place the duo in the middle of the ambient movement or tag them as throwbacks to the techno rebellion, but neither would be fair.Although elements of both idioms can be found within the record's six compositions, there is also way too much deep primal soul soaked into the arrangements to allow for such easy connections. "Fifty-Six 001", for example, is a vibrant collage of kicky percussion, pillowy synth passages, and perky pop melodies, wrapped in a bass line that is rich and funky as any urban record. The same can be said for the seductive first single, "Releasing The Beauty Within," except that the groove is decidedly house-friendly, and guest belter Sissy Peoples provides a rousing, almost gospel-like feel to the track.

The pair's creative roots go back to 1984, when they began issuing cassettes along the experimental and college radio circuits under the self-dubbed banner of Bam Bam Productions. Over the course of three years and 28 tapes, a loyal underground following was amassed, as tastemakers branded the brothers geniuses. In 1990, Chris Burke was signed as a solo act to Mode Avant Records, releasing "Idioglossia", a collection that expanded on the Bam Bam vibe with its sprawling, often Eno-esque odes that were shaded with dada sound poetry. Al the while, Dan built a solid base as a club DJ with an ear for rave, break-beat and dancehall jams, among other groove goodies.

"Actually, it was Dan who pulled us into the dance music genre," says Burke, recalling the moment in November 1991 when the seeds of Glorified Magnified were sown. In the time between then and inking a deal with Kinetic/Sire last year, the team made noise unde the name BloodBank with the EP "Not The End of the World, Darling" while Chris took a public stand on the Gulf War with the caustic release "Oil War."

Beyond completing the promotional chores behind "All Wave Super," Burke is eyeing the challenge of future compositions, for which he and Dan will aim to combine their increasing pop focus with left-field club sensibilities and mind-expanding experimentation. If their output to date is any indication, folks who are not afraid to use all of their senses while twirling are in for countless treats. -Larry Flick

During the Persian Gulf war, the American people demanded the right not to know. "Poll Backs Control of News," blared the headline of a January 31, 1991, New York Times article. "Given a choice between increasing military control over information or leaving it to news organizations to make most decisions about reporting on the war," the story informed, "57 percent of those responding said they would favor greater miltary control."

Chris Burke isn't surprised. "An independent study found that the more people watched TV during the Gulf crisis, the less they knew about the underlying issues and the more likely they were to support the war," he points out. Burke, 33, is a media hacker whose audio montages- dissected, stitched-together versions of press conferences, presidential speeches, and the nightly news- are pirate C-Span for Noam Chomsky fans.

Broadcast during Operation Desert Storm by New York's WBAI-FM, Oil War indicts dissembling politicians, a press happy with the fit of its muzzle, and a citizenry high on jingoism and the joy of carpet-bombing. Dark billowing synths shot through with flickering strings hang like a thunderhead over the title track. Amidst the tumult of war-whooping anchormen- punctuated incongruously by cartoon boi-oi-oings and kah-blooeys- a deftly edited George Bush declares, "Our objectives in the Persian Gulf are clear: outlaw action and profiteering."

On "New Technology On Trial," Burke contrasts a brooding classicism familiar from Danny Elfman movie scores with quick-step drum machine rhythms that bring boot camp into the discotheque. While snares and vocal samples stutter like belt-fed machine guns, military experts rhapsodize about f-15 Eagles and A-10 Warthogs. "Five hundred people were killed when the allies destroyed a Baghdad bomb shelter," notes Tom Brokaw, but why let grisly facts dampen the superbowl euphoria of the moment? As the Nintendo tag line runs, "Once you start playing, nothing else matters."

In the a cappella piece "New Word Order," Burke transforms the president into a ventriloquist's dummy. "This is the first assault in which the nations of the world can no longer count on East-West confrontation to stymie AMerican ambitions," George Bush is made to say. "A new world oder can emerge, a world in which there will be a lasting role for a sound defense budget." It is virtuoso plagiarism, executed with the surgical precision so beloved of Pentagon flacks.

"That piece," explains Burke, "was the result of a lot of information-gathering. When things began to happen, I started videotaping newscasts, which I later logged, transcribing keys phrases. Then, using a MacIntosh running SoundEdit, I sampled all of the phrases into the computer, editing them into long strings and laying them down on a Tascam 1/2-inch eight-track. The piece consisted of about five or six strings."

The M. C. Esheresque worlds within worlds implied by SoundEdit's graphic editing capabilities inspired Burke's pointilistic stuides in "creating textures by chopping samples into fine bits and reorganizing them" on Idioglossia (CD, Mode Records, Box 375, Kew Gardens, NY 11415). Droll as Oil War is doomy, Idioglossia exhibits a cockeyed, Ernie Kovacsish sense of humor and a winning way with cut-and-paste that nabbed it thied place in the 1990 New Sounds Listeners' Poll on NPR.

In "Everything I Need," Burke lobs a grenade at Joe Cocker's "You Are So Beautiful" and calls the flying fragments art. "That piece began as a seven second chunk of a song, sampled off the radio," recalls Burke. "Then, by cutting and pasting, reversing short portions of the sample and repeating others, I made sonic cells, maybe ten seconds in length. By saving them as individual files and then stringing them together into one big file, I created a deconstructed pop song. Using nothing but that one sample, I created rhythmic patterns and harmonics that are nowhere to be found in the original material. If you edit a sample down to the tinyest fraction of a second and loop it, you'll get a very different note when you play it back. Also you can create amazing harmonic motifs by transposing pitches or mixing them together.

Burke, who also composes music for film and television, has just released Not The End of the World, Darling (CD Arrest Records) and is currently at work on El Patron. The former, a collaboration with his brother Dan under the name BloodBank, is techno and acid house-influenced dance music for jelly-like masses that move by pseudopodia ("We failed completely in our attempt at making the music danceable," chuckles Burke). The latter is hörstück, or aural drama, about Iran-Contra, its splintered narrative fashioned from sampled voices.

"El Patron," says Burke, "is the true story of a man who committed violent acts in the name of American foreign policy. It examines the media's role in the manufacture of consent for that policy. It's amazing to me that after all the Iran-Contra testimony, people still don't know what happened." -Mark Dery