OBEY!

Believe what you've heard only when it comes to Bimora.

Watch what you think at the next Bimora show. Guard your thoughts closely. Don't let anything too revealing slip across your lobes. Perhaps, wear a tin-foil hat. The band, it would seem, along with mastering improvisational hard funky rock with a message, are accomplished telepaths. So powerful, they can share thoughts between two separate interviews - one in Lafayette and one by phone in Alexandria. Both times, staggeringly close to the exact same words and phrasings came out of their mouths, as if they were just conduits to some unseen puppetmaster.

If it's not a mind meld at work, then Bimora's members must be vehemently fundamentalist on spreading their message. The message springs forth in songs like "TV.nerial," where front man James Hutchinson, speaking for the band and himself, warns against television's "socialist anti-independent politics." "Triaticus" points the angry finger at twisting masses of information. On "$old" consumers are robots and convenience is a god to slaves who buy, do and think what they are told, which is a direct violation of all things Bimora.

"My main point of that (the message) is just because you are taught something doesn't make it true," says bassist Darron Wood. "It's nothing more than just talk. Before you know how you really feel and your view on anything - what pair of shoes you want to buy to what kind of music you want to listen to, whether or not you think we should be at war or whatever - listen to yourself. You have to turn off the f--king TV from force feeding your opinion down your throat all the time."

Simplifying himself, Wood says listeners should just be themselves. A few hours earlier in the day, front man Hutchinson spoke nearly the exact same thought at the band's storage/practice space at Uncle Bob's. However, Hutchinson grants a partial indulgence to anyone caught up in the tangle of coaxial cable.

"I think we are all part of this whole thing. Nobody is exempt from everything we talk about. We are all a part of it, but just pointing it out makes you realize, 'hey step back,'" says Hutchinson, whose vocals border on an MC and, at times, a cynical pitchman. "There are a lot of us that, socially, think the same way, feel the same way, about a lot of things, but we don't really talk about it a whole lot, because we are so busy with our day-to-day lives and our snippets of information we are constantly having to deal with."

The project sprang out of a meeting between Wood and guitarist Josh Allen in a music theory class at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Both music majors, they plotted and nitpicked diverse members who would fill the ranks of their band. After eight months of work, they built the foundation. Making their band further stand out, they enlisted saxophonist Chris Welcker, who says playing a saxophone is "kinda hard to fit into most bands unless it's jazz or ska." Front man Hutchinson came on board after seven years of bouncing from improv project to improv project - despite feeling constrained by having set lyrics. Since their inception, four drummers have sat behind the kit.

From the beginning, politics and venom for American consumerism was apparent. For a name, Wood first wanted Buy More Stuff but disliked using stuff, so he invented a new word. When queried about its meaning, they have occasionally offered that it is Italian or attributed it to Biodemographic Members of Reproductive Aging: a study of menopausal women.

Aside from the message, Bimora remains about having a good time and expressing a bit of truth at the same time, as Allen would say, "The truth of fun."

"Personally, I think music is art, " says Hutchinson. "The majority of what the radio produces isn't. I just want to make sure it stays artistic, creative, fresh and doesn't have any boundary," says Hutchinson, dropping boundary, which is another repeated Bimora musing. And what best supercedes boundaries? "Just let it go."

So far, just letting it go means asking the Renaissance's house DJs to scratch over them as they play, hauling an artist's sculpture with a TV stuck in its torso on stage and adding Dickie Landry to Welcker's one-man horn section.

You may see Bimora perform four times and not see exactly the same thing twice. Chalk this and other elements of their creative process up to their adherence to improvising at shows. Improvisation plays a large part in how their music is created and how it is presented.

"The majority of the first five songs we wrote, we had this little s--tty tape recorder in the corner, and we'd turn it on and just start playing and go back and listen to it, " says Wood. "Some of it was f--king horrible; some of it was good. We just kind of picked through it and picked what we liked and work with it from there. I'd say that 90 percent of our songs come from - the original idea - comes from improv."

Allen agrees stating, "There are designated areas where you can pretty much do what you want, but not as much as I'd like. I would like to have more spatial things between songs, because people get burnt-out on bands especially if you are playing one area all the time. You just have to give them something new each time. That's why we played 'Chattahoochee' last time."

Between songs at a recent show, they suddenly broke into the backing music for the Alan Jackson song as Hutchinson free-styled crazy nonsense and asked the crowd if they liked country music. Had he turned the mic over to Allen, he would have got an offkey but lyrically accurate version of "Chattahoochee." Allen spent too many a night busing tables at Logan's Roadhouse not to know the lyrics to that or any of the Dixie Chicks' first record.

When the improv starts, there is no telling where it will stop. At one show, Bimora played "Popeye the Sailor Man." The improv sessions are also likely to break out at the end of the night when the band exhausts their material, but the crowd still wants more. Allen laughs that an encore filler "ends up being the best song we've ever played."

"It's the money shot," says Welcker.