hen was the last time you bought a CD in a hexagonal hand painted black and yellow sleeve that wraps itself folds around the CD, the inside cover of which is actually the embracing arms of some cartoon figure? Your CDs still come in the black / clear plastic boxes? Bummer.

Coming from an incredibly eclectic gypsy / folk / jazz / rock / ceilidh background, this latest Aranos (pronounced aranyosh) disc though details his ongoing interest in experimental electronic pastimes. Eschewing the obvious expected merging of electronic and acoustic parts into an annoying folktronica vibe, he instead takes a 72-minute exploratory passage through sounds that are free of influence or clear genre constraint.

It’s not surprising that Aranos has been a regular improvisational collaborator with Nurse With Wound, as the three pieces here are built from sounds that almost sound identifiable but escape precise definition. Does the ten minute "36 Overgrown Umbrellas" soundtrack the kind of swooping insect action you’d get on a slow motion vigil of a corpse or is it the song of animals waiting for dusk to fall before ripping the meat from a beached whale? Either way these treatments (possibly violin based) are about as unsettling a set of loosely tethered sounds you’re likely to hear this year, moving undecided between organic and digital.

"Rocky Windows in Glum Horizons" isn’t that far removed from its predecessor (although it is twice as long, with closer "Drops of Golden Clams Transcended Seething Blue Craters" being twice as long again), taking the higher end of the scale notes over an interesting swell of bubbling noise that reminds one of John Cage’s First Construction (in Metal) being played two rooms away. The track would’ve worked much better as an extension to the opener, as the real world percussion serves as a clearer realisation of the underground sounds of the first track.

Sounding completely dissimilar to the other two pieces (which sound like they might’ve been sourced from the same library of sounds), the closing "Drops of Golden Clams Transcended Seething Blue Craters" is a perfect portion of homespun simplicity which manages to be both like ‘digital Partch & Moondog on a country day out’ slice of abnormally gorgeous complexity and a hand-built musical construct made to sound effortless.

Whether the organic life form noises in the song are of human origin or coming from an ecstatically blissed up bear is open for debate. Regardless, this individual sits surrounded by a menagerie of sound ranging from the guttural beatboxing of a frog to birdcalls to a sawing wheezing donkey. Curving peculiar squeaking sounds bend round corners as cardboard tubes, strings, and electronic squiggles are played along with distant piano. The pulsing hum that underlies this rises unhurriedly, as the musical test work falls away in strips and leaves an initially cold dark stream of interlacing billowing waves. In the following thirty minutes metallic clinks and infinitesimal backwards slivers appear and the waves end up engulfing and embracing the head—just like the sleeve’s surrounding five leaves do the disc.