Adam Swan (R) and Tyler Swan (L) with Foscil at BLVD Gallery

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Wildly inventive Seattle band Foscil works in a style that may or may not be commercially viable—sci-fi-sounding, movie soundtrack-y jazz-rock fusion—but the band doesn't care about that. It's all about the music, man.

Foscil plays songs from its upcoming December release "Residential" Saturday at The Crocodile. Three members will sit, one will stand, everyone will look like they're in a regular band even though they aren't.

Other things Foscil doesn't care about: appealing to hipsters, worrying about occasionally dipping into avant-elevator jazz, or sounding anything like Truckasauras, the popular electro/dance/hiphop concern three of its four members are also in. (Ryan Trudell and brothers Adam and Tyler Swan are in Truckasauras; Anthony Moore plays in local Gypsy swing/'60s rock group Raggedy Anns). Adam Swan calls Foscil "kinda self-indulgent."

"That's the luxury of Foscil," Swan says on the phone. "There's no press to do anything. It's all really comfortable and natural and doesn't feel like a job."

The members are all in their late-20s/early-30s, all from Kirkland, all purple kangaroos (the mascot of Lake Washington High School), and Foscil will probably never break up because nobody plans on stopping being friends.

"Residential" is named after Foscil's half-year-long residency at Belltown's now-closed BLVD Gallery in 2008, where the band forced experiments on itself in an urban contemporary art environment. One concert was played using only electronic instruments and samplers, another with traditional instruments, another with a rapper, and so on. Each made flexible use of material co-written by the group in a Greenlake house.

Finished in Fall 2008, "Residential" sat for a year while Truckasauras became the best band in Seattle. It'll be released on 7-inch records in an accordion-style book by boutique New York outfit Journal of Popular Noise—only 300 copies—and on iTunes.

Perhaps the most creatively sourced sound on "Residential" is the first one on the album, a bell-like tone used for a super-slow hook on "Danger." It comes from an old music box the Swan brothers grew up with in Kirkland. They took it apart, figured out how to slow it down, and isolated individual notes which they recorded and sampled. In the background of the track, slow suspense comes from a synthesizer, fading to the foreground; glockenspiel and marimba decorate the space and brassy trumpet notes arc over the whole thing (Anthony Moore has a degree in jazz trumpet). The song sounds like waking up in a planetarium.

"Filfy" is another oddity, a loose, instrumental cover of a song by Filthy Rich, a beyond-obscure local rapper. Foscil found out about Filthy Rich through old-school Seattle abstract-rapper Specs One, a Foscil collaborator who has a large collection of rap CD-Rs that never made it out into the world. When "Filfy" drops bass clarinets over a Tyler Swan breakbeat (he's a beast on drums), it's a warm, triumphant hit.

Foscil indulges in unnecessary moments sometimes. When Adam Swan's Radiohead/Tortoise-style guitar lines mix with Moore adopting a neo-mariachi trumpeting style, it's a bad combination from good chefs. On some songs, like the Mark Mothersbaugh-esque "Roy The Barber," the band sounds cutesy. Not its strong suit.

"Ran" is Foscil at its best, unhurried through a gorgeous rainy-night electro/acoustic song. Synths are used for depth, melodica for lightness, and Moore's trumpet/clarinet for overall lift-off. The arrangement is weird, but doesn't call attention to its own weirdness. It's mellow, sad, perfect.

Anthony Moore (L) and Tyler Swan (R) at BLVD Gallery

Live photos by Martin Collette, product shot by Jeremy Balderson