As Mark Bingham began the process of closing down Piety Street Studio he began lining up the projects he would work on in the future.

His impact as a producer overshadowed his considerable skills as a musician, so one of the things he had in mind was to play more.

Better Than Expected is a collaboration with his buddy Peter Stampfel, notoriously of the Holy Modal Rounders and Fugs, in a banjo-vocal nonet that also features Stampfel’s daughter Zoe. The results of this banjo choir (Bingham also plays guitar on some tracks) are anarchic in ways that recall Stampfel’s hallucinogenic recordings for ESP Disc with both the Fugs and the Rounders, yet also strangely soothing in an extraterrestrial kind of way.

“Vocal Exercise” sounds like an outtake from the soundtrack to Liquid Sky, the music of aliens searching for heroin. “G Tuning # 1” is like a morning raga of instrumental banjo music under the influence of peyote with strange, reassuringly off key and comic humming from the choir. “C Modal Tuning Page 64” could be a lullaby.

Their version of the Japanese-written pop tune “Sukiyaki,” which Bingham has been playing at Yuki on Frenchmen Street, is gorgeous in some unfathomable way.

Stampfel’s own unmistakable vocal style, a yowling, high-pitched evocation of moonshine-inspired back porch emoting, is in top form on “Eat That Roadkill,” a song he wrote based on an 1880s minstrel show tune called “Carve Dat Possum.” “NSA Man,” an update of the Fugs classic “CIA Man,” arrives just in time for our latest war.

The album is also a work in progress as explained by Stampfel in the liner notes. Anyone who has lyrics to match the banjo instrumentals can forward them to Stampfel himself at [email protected].

As he explains of “Castor and Pollux,” “Another experiment in ultra-simplicity, almost the whole tune is played with just the 2 outside strings, so all the fretting is done on the first (D) string. Although it has a name, words welcome.”