Size & Tears : Alice in Wonderland (EU) [Limited]

Tusia Beridze's work in electronic music is already distinct and unusual enough, but with her third full album she finds a new level of dramatic surprise -- at two and a half hours, the two-disc Size and Tears is one of the most cryptic but still engaging concept albums yet recorded. Rather than openly or clearly telling a story via the liner notes or art, everything is done with the song titles and presentation itself, the combination of varying musical parts and half-understood vocal snippets creating the feeling of an epic journey, somewhere between Lewis Carroll, Tove Jansson, and Neil Gaiman. Beridze's own vocals are spare throughout the first disc, but on songs like "Her Jewels" the unnerving duets with herself are a winsome-seeming-creepy triumph. On the second, she appears more regularly from song to song, almost as if the understated fantasy story at the heart of the album is taking more shape. On "Topeka Exists," a more conventional song form is mixed with distanced but soothing singing and subtle use of vocal distortion over the gentle music, making for one of the album's most accessible efforts. The overall result is an immediately engaging surprise and one of the few IDM-style releases in the new century not simply rehashing the ground rules from the 1990s. Hyperactive skittering piano and string runs on "Myth in Fingers" and stentorian pacing on "Itaka Farewell March" rub up against crackling humming-machinery-gone-wrong collages on "Same Walk Ink" and the chaotic swirls and jump cuts of "Aick Plays Miami for Kids," where buried mechanistic crunch and the calmest of melodies overlay and then separate. ~ Ned Raggett|