Trans substantial rock: gender-bending duo Bitch and Animal go where they want and do what they want on their latest album, Eternally Hard. (music).

"What Animal and I do best is improvisation," says 28-year-old Bitch, a self-identified "queer elegant queen" who hails from Detroit but now, with 25-year-old partner-in-art Animal, calls Brooklyn, N.Y., her home. "I think of us more as performance artists than musicians, really."

Indeed, after one listen to the duo's sophomore disc, Eternally Hard, with its torrid brew of sexually and politically charged spoken-sung lyrics, stripped-down instrumentation, and assorted tribal-edged percussion, you'll understand what she means. Not that the two aren't more than adept on their instruments--Animal's percussive use of djembes, steel drums, gongs, and even body parts is inspiring, while Bitch is equally skilled on electric bass and violin (and both even play ukulele). But there's no mistaking that their emphasis is on their process rather than just the music for its own sake.

Take "Sparkly Queen Areola," their ode to the illegal-to-display-in-most-states part of a woman's breast. The song debuted as a brief chant on the pair's 1999 album, What's That Smell? and reappears on Eternally Hard in a more musically complete form. "Animal was playing around on the keyboards and just started singing out of nowhere, so we rolled tape and she just laid it down out of her ass," Bitch recalls, laughing. "I like to think of the Sparkly Queen as our improv goddess."

Cuts like "Best Cock on the Block" and "Boy Girl Wonder" are gender-bending rap-punk jaunts that serve to better describe how Animal self-identifies than the term she offers: "mo-sexual queep" (queep being short for "queer people"). Tracks like "Ganja" are perhaps more frivolous, while folkish songs like "Miss Me My Dear" are more earnest and musically sparse.

On the whole, Eternally Hard is difficult to categorize--a style point that has won Bitch and Animal fans including Ani DiFranco (whose label, Righteous Babe, is releasing Hard). "We always wanted to make art and travel, but we never really knew how it was going to look," Bitch says. "Now we're traveling in our bus, our mobile recording studio, and it feels like we've finally attained that goal."

Find links to Bitch and Animal's official Web site and other related sites at www.advocate.com

Coble edits Dance Music Authority magazine.