That the blogosphere doesn’t quite know what to make of Battle Trance is obvious: the New York City saxophone quartet’s debut, Palace of Wind, has already garnered comparisons to black metal, American minimalism, and free jazz. Given that bandleader Travis Laplante is completely up-front about his belief in sound as a source of psychic and physical healing, however, there’s another category that Battle Trance might fit into: new-age music.

If so, the new age just got a whole lot more interesting—although that’s not necessarily Laplante’s intent.

“Put it this way: the goal isn’t to impress listeners, or for them to necessarily have an intellectually based experience,” the intense 31-year-old explains, on the line from a cottage on the grounds of the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck, New York. “That’s welcome, of course, if they do have that, but I’m interested in working with resonance in sound to open the human heart, and to assist in reminding people who they really are. Performing Palace of Wind night after night reminds me of who I am, and all the things that I’ve forgotten. I’m trying to remember who I really am.”

Laplante is in Rhinebeck to facilitate a workshop with his teacher, qigong master Robert Peng. The Chinese science of breath control has obvious positive implications for any wind-instrument player, but the saxophonist contends that they’re incidental to the emotional benefits of his studies. Without them, he explains, he would never have had the nerve to ask Matthew Nelson, Jeremy Viner, and Patrick Breiner to join him in not just a saxophone quartet, but a tenor saxophone quartet.

“The other three individuals in the band are not qigong practitioners, so it wasn’t qigong that brought us together,” he notes. “But I will say that my practices in Chinese medicine and qigong were essential to the manifestation of this band, and to me becoming fearless enough to have a seemingly random thought—that I should start a band with these three individuals—and to be able to tell that it came from a very real place, from the heart. So I didn’t doubt myself and say, ‘Oh, this is a crazy idea,’ or ‘I don’t really know these guys that well; this seems reckless.’ None of those fears or issues came up, and I do think that my fear in life has lessened considerably since beginning the work I do in the Chinese-medicine tradition.”

Palace of Wind is a good advertisement for breath control and contemplation: the three-movement, 43-minute suite has a seamless, riverine flow, winding in turn through restful shallows and rushing rapids. Remarkably, it displays considerable compositional complexity while retaining the feel of an improvised piece, something Laplante attributes to the “buffer zones” he’s built into the score, which allow for spur-of-the-moment modifications on the part of the band. Even more remarkable, though, is that you never get the sense that you’re listening to a band that’s constrained by the limited timbral resources of four identical instruments.

“I really feel that there is a very visceral and very human connection that many folks have to the saxophone who are not necessarily musicians or have any knowledge of modern classical music or jazz or anything like that,” Laplante says. “And that’s because they’re able to connect with the breath. People really resonate to the fact that there are four men on-stage breathing together. That’s something that people connect to on a very primal level.”

Battle Trance plays the Emerald next Thursday (October 30).