The cryptic moniker is actually the operating vehicle for one Jeff Mueller of Seattle, who's on a mission to fuse the sounds of "electronic downbeat and experimental noise," and by and large i'd say he succeeds. I like the way the disc opens, with "saxifraga 1" (featuring trumpet, not sax) -- over a droning sample that grows in volume, then density, beats slowly emerge. Not just beats, but big beats, insistent beats, growing bigger and bigger, as a trumpet joins the fray and suddenly it's something like Miles soloing over a drum 'n bass combo. Experimental noise moves eventually worm their way into the picture, and the beat -- whether it's active or not -- remains supreme. The beats on "only a straw to breathe" are jazzier and less persistent (sometimes dropping out entirely), but the rest of the sound is more sinister and ambient, big rolling waves of thunder and fury before the beat leads back out. I don't know what the hell he's doing with Jim Lambert on "wasp," but it's somewhere between deranged to the point of inspiration or just purely annoying -- squeaky voices looped for infinty over a collage beat and various high-pitched squealing noises cycling on and off, the kind of thing that would probably give you bad flashbacks if you'd ever done acid. The swirling space-rock sounds that define (very briefly -- it may be the shortest song on the album) "adrift" are just proof that i'm not the only one who's ever attempted to emulate Steve Filler's goofy guitar sounds with better, louder equipment. Some of the songs take a good while to build from nothingness (shades of Illusion of Safety), a practice that always makes me nervous for some reason; of the best of them is "airtight spirit containers" (which gets bonus points anyway for the utterly swell title), which eventually turns into a drifting, throbbing ocean of ambient hiss and rumble over which a wildly-reverbed guitar slowly squeals and saws. I don't know what's up with the cryptic title and all that, but the man makes some powerful jazz-laced dark ambient sounds. Could be an interesting one to watch over time.