Boston's musical mad scientist Animal Hospital makes a record with a 'Shelf Life'

When Kevin Micka worked as an electronics repairer, he would be chagrined when customers asked him to fix amps that weren’t making a “standard” sound. “I like things with more character,” he says. “Someone would say ‘this sounds wrong,’ and they just wanted to sound like everyone else. But sometimes when something isn’t operating properly it can be freeing. You can embrace the pretty with the ugly.”

The concept of celebrating sounds that are far from standard has served multi-instrumentalist Micka well over the nearly 20 years he’s been performing mostly experimental instrumental music under the moniker Animal Hospital. Over that time, Animal Hospital has been everything from a sprawling mass ensemble of musicians to just Micka with his guitar and the homemade contraption he calls “The Box.” But despite playing shows around the world and becoming one of Boston’s most beloved musical alchemists, Micka only released four albums between 2005 and 2020.

Now he’s back with “Shelf Life,” which is out in early November. The collection of four tracks finds Micka tackling pieces that have been part of his live shows for years. “These started as improvisations, but the arrangement is never static or permanently structured,” he explains. “Parts and notes come out in different ways, so it’s hard to get it to culminate into one definitive studio version.”

The disc begins with “Fuselage,” one of the more fast-rocking Animal Hospital pieces, and one that also includes fellow multi-instrumentalists Ernie Kim and Frank Aveni. The piece had earlier been performed with the large ensemble, which had as many as 30 musicians, including 22 guitarists.

In the album’s press release, Micka calls the disc his “rock record.” “I’ve been trying to be less self-conscious about what people like, that people who like this might not like a more experimental record,” he says while strolling around his Inman Square neighborhood. One might assume that an artist who has devoted years to a non-commercial sound might be completely uninterested in how critics and audiences respond, but Micka admits that he’s had to “figure out my relationship with music. Animal Hospital has been such a big part of my identity, and I’ve had to [come to a place where] how the world feels about it doesn’t destroy my own self-worth.”

The second cut, “Awful Beast,” is a showcase for The Box, the 19-by-10-by-6-inch portable musical toolkit that lets Micka mute sounds, add loops, shift tones and textures, and add rhythms and phases, all in real time in a way that recalls the improvisatory work of dub reggae engineers. There’s a licorice box with a contact mic inside, and an old toy microphone. Micka says the device, built when the first Obama inauguration was on, came about because “I was playing drums in bands. I liked touring, but the other members weren’t as excited, so I wanted to figure out how I could play on my own and still travel.”

That travel increased when Micka became the guitar tech for Yo La Tengo. On the hard touring band’s nights off, he’d book his own shows. “I was only playing in Boston once a year, but I might be playing to five people in Taipei,” he recalls. The Box was able to replace two large suitcases full of pedals and cables and a drum kit.

Another key moment in Micka’s artistic transition came when he was asked to play a show as part of the long-running Boston experimental and creative music series Non-Event. Micka says he wondered as someone whose roots were in the rock scene “Do I even belong on a Non-Event bill?” (Micka remains one of the series’ recording and live engineers.)

The title “Awful Beast” is a tongue-in-cheek reference to how long it took Micka to develop it. “It has rhythm and noise and melody. It feels representative of my personality — and it’s got some goofy parts,” he says.

Clocking in at over 16 minutes, “His Amazing Friends” is the longest track on the album. “I hate to use the word anthemic, but it just builds and builds and it feels really good,” says Micka.

A former projectionist for the Coolidge Corner Theatre and Provincetown Film Festival, Micka now works at a company that provides live projection services for festivals and special events. It’s an appropriate gig for someone whose music has such cinematic qualities. While some of his past music has been used on the soundtracks to serious documentaries and in the British teen TV series “Skins,” Micka jokes that “maybe these songs could be in a more entertaining film, an action film like the new ‘Bladerunner.’”

“In the past, I wasn’t always thinking of music as entertainment, and I’m more comfortable with that now,” adds Micka.

“Shelf Life” ends with “As Always,” which Micka describes as a homemade field recording created when he was testing out an amp he had repaired. “I had no intention of ever releasing it. It was just a little chord progression I had recorded in my workshop,” he says. “Sometimes the first take is the best — I’m never going to be as relaxed as I was when I made it. I wasn’t thinking about the mic or amp. It represents a very relaxed counterpoint to the other stuff on the record which is very specifically engineered and written and recorded. It seemed like a good place to end up.”

Animal Hospital performs Dec. 15 at Myrtle in Providence, Rhode Island with A Band Called E and Handsy, and on Jan. 14 at State Park in Cambridge.