Fresh off a summer tour, the Jorge Arana Trio puts out an untamed new EP

When people attempt to sum up the music of the Jorge Arana Trio, they wind up making a whole record store’s worth of comparisons. Reviewers have found the trio analogous to the Mars Volta, Bauhaus and John Zorn. There’s probably a little bit of Deerhoof in there, too. And the band’s latest EP, July’s Oso, floats without allegiance from surf to experimental jazz to prog, making a sound that’s hard to envision, let alone describe. You might as well try to explain the significance of your strangest recurring dream.

Seated around the dining-room table of drummer Josh Enyart’s Kansas City, Kansas, home, the three musicians address this confusion with a group shrug.

“Everyone hears something different in it,” Enyart, 33, says, smiling good-naturedly. “On this tour, we had a lot of people talk about Miles Davis and Tony Williams. A lot of the time, when people talk about what they receive out of our music, it’s something I’ve never even heard of.”

Enyart shares a laugh with 26-year-old bassist Jason Nash. “I’m working on being able to describe it in less than 30 seconds,” Nash says. “At first, I would just start to trail off and not be able to do it, but anymore I just tell people it’s fast and chaotic.”

Nash leans forward on his elbows when he talks, giving him an air of eagerness that cuts through the relaxed setting. It would seem that conflict and chaos are things that Enyart, Nash and 30-year-old Jorge Arana (the band’s namesake, guitarist and keyboard player) aim to achieve, even in their schedules. On this day, despite the early afternoon, the three men are a little on the groggy side, and the dining room is kept rather dark, with one dim light throwing shadows around the walls. This is likely because the band members have had little sleep since arriving back to KC earlier, at around 4 a.m., from a regional summer tour.

When they talk about this brief run, though, they perk up. The tour was good for them, they agree. Yes, the comparisons remain constant and never quite right. But the point is less that people interpret this music exactly than that they simply enjoy it.

“Usually by the end of the first song, there’s a pretty good reaction,” Enyart says of the trio’s live experience. “They’re like, ‘Wait, that was pretty badass.’ And I tell people to look at our music like storytelling through instrumentation. It’s designed to inspire your imagination.”

There’s no shortage of imagination on Oso. The EP isn’t quite 12 minutes, but that brief running time offers a bounty of sounds. Opening track “Foredoom” bursts open like a piñata filled with rotten candy, screeching at you before fading into the less jarring jazz grooves of “Kallisto.” But those friendly waves, too, are soon overthrown by some mean riffs. “Old Bamboo” moves along with handclaps that seem to function outside the rhythm of the song. And closing track “Banished to Siberia” sweats out any last resistance you may have, with smoky guitar notes and a psychedelic vibe. (There’s some weird, zombielike humming in there, too, where the chorus would usually go.)

“There’s a little bit of everything in there,” Arana says of the set. “Musically, we’re trying to make something new and fresh. For a lot of people, it’s pretty odd stuff. It’s a little wild.”

As the three musicians relax deeper into their chairs and keep talking, they seem genuinely glad to be home — ready, they say, to share more of their odd stories. The Jorge Arana Trio’s music may be wild, but it’s not impossible to find a connection to it. And 12 minutes suddenly seems like not nearly enough.