The barriers of musical genres, once thought to be indestructible, are being toppled like Berlin walls. Guitars are wedding turntables, sitars are sleeping with drum machines, samples are flirting with live instruments. At the forefront of this orgy of innovation is a phenomenon known as Lake Trout.

"We have no ideal audience, our ideal audience is a mix: Ravers, indies, college kids, hippies, hip-hop fans, anyone and everyone who can appreciate the music," says guitarist Ed Harris, "We like to change for our audience, stylistically we have a large range of molds that we can place ourselves into for the night. We can go ambient, chill it down a little, or rev it up, rock it out, make it jazzy, or go all out with some heavy drum and bass." On Sunday night, Lake Trout will join Galactic and Les Claypool for some bootie shakin" at Detroit"s Fox Theater. Originally a jazz-based improvisational group from Baltimore, Lake Trout have involved into an octopus of musical stylings. "If we were DJs you could say that we just keep changing our pile of records," says Harris. Recently they have settled most comfortably into a breakbeat, drum and bass style, only with live instruments instead of computers and sampling. If you hear them play, you might think otherwise drummer Mike Lowry has accomplished a cyborgian feat in duplicating the fast, hard drumming style previously attributed only to machines.

But their innovation does not hamper their playing they still jam out, although they don"t like to be classified as a jam band. "We try to avoid being grouped together with "jam bands." We aren"t solo based, our influences are so diverse, Coltrane, Dr. Octagon, Radiohead, Amon Tobin and our sound is clearly techno influenced." Instead of soloing the band concentrates on functioning together, weaving trances-like melodies to transmit emotional intensity, much like Digweed or Oakenfold might spin a night at Ibiza.

Classifying a band takes away from what they"re trying to accomplish, it creates biases that wouldn"t ordinarily exist and alienates people from music they might want to hear. Classifying a band as "techno" will estrange some die-hard rock fans, while classifying it as "rock" or "jazz" will distance ravers. Lake Trout"s fanbase has begun to call their music "Organica" in order to avoid the trappings of categorization and signify the organic, innovative quality of the music. When asked if he"d rather sacrifice style for innovation or innovation for style, Harris passively replied, "We don"t want to expand for the purpose of being different, hopefully the evolution will come naturally. I like to think that our sound is constantly changing, but always retaining certain qualities that we can call our own."

So what should you expect on Sunday night? Expect nothing. Expect everything. You"ll be astonished either way.