"Sometime in the mid to late 1970s, I conceived of making a record that would be an obstacle course."

To the average person, that might sound as nonsensical as a fish riding a bike. But for 53-year-old conceptual artist tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE (who prefers not to use his given name, but for abbreviated purposes he's often called "Tent"), it's only the beginning of more than a dozen pages of liner notes for a vinyl record album that he has intentionally designed as an obstacle course, both physically and sonically. He will hold a release event for the album, called "Mechanically Repetitive/ReRecorded Records Record," Wednesday at Pittsburgh Filmmakers' Melwood Screening Room.

Confusing and bemusing the art-going public is nothing new for Tent.

Beginning in Baltimore as a writer in the late '60s, his music began as folk song, progressing to free-form improvisation and musique concrete (tape manipulation of sound), while he also ignited an interest in experimental filmmaking in 1974. Following a long and storied history as avant-garde raconteur in the Charm City, he decided to move to Pittsburgh in 1996 after local avant-garde film collective Orgone Cinema brought him twice to town for presentations.

"I was looking for a new city in the U.S. to live in, and [Orgone] convinced me that Pittsburgh was the place to be," recalls Tent. "When I originally moved here, the reason I stated was because I was shipwrecked and couldn't afford to go anywhere else. But now I'm staying because I like the topography, the culture and the general attitude of people in the city. There's a greater working-class solidarity here than in other cities -- a subconscious feeling of a strong labor history."

If you get the idea that radical politics might inform much of Tent's musical and visual work, you'd be on target. He labels himself as an anarchist, but not in the sense of violent overthrow or even Anti-Flag's pat punk-rock slogans. There's even a hint of libertarianism in his philosophy. "People should take responsibility for themselves and not be passive slaves -- what psychologist Louis Yablonsky called 'robopaths,' or those allowing themselves to be controlled and shaped by external forces."

Most of Tent's creations, in fact, are imbued with his advocacy for individualist critical perception -- when one encounters his confrontational, intellectual methods, one is always encouraged to think. In 1992, a record label called Wafer Face released two vinyl records for Tent, the second one being "Usic - ?-1 = A Plethora of No Longer Neglected Audio/Conceptual Obstacle Courses," which contained both a double groove (the needle had to be repositioned twice to get each spiral to play) and four lock grooves at the beginning and end of each side.

This brings us to "Mechanically Repetitive," a new album released by locally based Dear Skull Records, which is anything but easy to understand unless you happen to have a master's degree in 20th-century experimental music.

But Tent can explain it in fair layman's terms. "The record is presenting a retrospective of my uses of pre-recorded materials in active rather than in passive ways. One has to at least pick up the needle every once in a while and make some observation about how the thing physically works. It's not the same as automatically connecting to the iTunes music store when you turn on your iPod, thereby choosing something to consume. It's a lot more interactive."

Side A of the record includes sound-art pieces produced by Tent over the past 10 years. On the first track, Tent uses samples from Pittsburgh saxophonist Ben Opie (of the Thoth Trio and Opek big band).

"I asked him to record 16 examples of him playing alto sax, each one representing a different extended technique. It's pretty oblique, [because] I superimposed them on top of an older piece from 1979, and they don't sound very much like the way Ben would normally play."

Another Pittsburgh music scene luminary on the new LP is hip-hop DJ Selecta, aka Jim Scoglietti, the proprietor of the Squirrel Hill-based 720 Records store. In 1996, on the air at Carnegie Mellon radio station WRCT-FM, Selecta followed a series of Tent's instructions in playing various parts of the "Usic" LP, while scratching hip-hop style between them. Meanwhile, four other station denizens were manipulating each of the record's lock grooves on four other turntables. "This was meant to be a demonstration of 'Usic' [the record itself] as an instrument. [It's an] example of ways you can use machinery as an instrument, rather than simply a device for playback," he explains.

Someone who directs several other people on how to play a piece is usually called a composer. And being familiar with the history of experimental music from the late 19th century to the present, Tent has no problem regarding himself as a composer in the classical sense.

"That's the tradition I come out of, even though my social existence would make me a perpetual outsider to the world. I give you, as an example, Franz Kamin, who was responsible for bringing [composer] Iannis Xenakis to the U.S. and was [poet] Jackson Maclowe's piano teacher. I'm pretty much the lunatic fringe of the classical world, or as I prefer to call it 'low classical,' since my orientation is to undermine the hierarchies of that music."

The inveterate prankster persona of Tent rears its head in the full-length movie "Backwards Masking in Rocks," which he'll also debut on Wednesday. "It started out as a simple joke about the recording technique known as backwards masking," he says. "It was inspired by two things: a 'Flash Gordon' episode where actors dress like rocks and speak in an ancient language, which was really just English played backwards, and a book called 'Backwards Masking Unmasked,' written by a minister to expose so-called 'Satanism' in music."

"I found his book to be incredibly stupid," adds Tent, "but one of the examples he used was the Beatles' 'Revolution #9,' which is basically just John Lennon playing around in the studio with some miscellaneous stuff. It's clearly an avant-garde piece, which has nothing to do with trying to turn everyone into homosexuals who overdose on drugs."

The plotline of the movie, if it can be considered to have one, is that rocks are subliminally controlling human beings to turn them into sex slaves. But it's never that simple with Tent. "I introduced the ideas of Richard Shaver, who wrote that rocks are ancient books that you can read by taking individual slices from them. He did paintings based on these slices, which are of naked women with large breasts seen from multiple angles. I worked that material into it, but then was annoyed by the minister's condemnation of rock music, so I put in different songs that refuted his generalizations or toyed with the word 'rock.' I used the Mothers of Invention's 'Help, I'm a Rock' but also Steppenwolf and Canned Heat, since both have drug warning songs."

"In a way, the film might be considered the weirdest Beatles documentary ever made, because [the Beatles] feature in it prominently under assumed names -- they're called The Crystals, and John Lennon is Lucite while Paul [McCartney] is Pyrite."

In true multimedia performance style reminiscent of the finest '60s happenings, Tent will combine both the sounds of the record and the visuals of the movie with live instrumentation, as Opie takes the stage with theremin, alto sax, clarinet and "a little robot electronic device" to provide subtle, additional touches as "atmospheric fill-in" for the first hour of the movie. Then for the last 20 minutes, Tent will bring up the lights a bit and begin playing two copies of the new LP as well as throwing in samples that went into making the piece. "Throughout the event, there'll be two other people," he adds, "[a] geologist, and [a character called] God's Chosen Person, who will be played by Babs Batera. Both of them will be leaping off the screen into the theater space, doing small parts relevant to the movie."

With both the album and the film's multiple references to popular music as well as the avant-garde techniques, it's clear that Tent is not attempting to withdraw from the mainstream entirely as much as to deal with it from the outside.

"I'm taking different elements of the culture that surrounds me, and turning it into a new culture that comments on the old, turning it into something as ridiculous as I can manage," he jokes. "I'm digesting things so that they become part of my body -- the body of work, or the body politic."