t first, the self-titled first track on sampling composer Carl Stone’s Nak Won is merely intimidating. There’s a brutal, seemingly unchanging tone, a primordial buzz and hum, hovering in the air, exacting swift, vicious vengeance on your eardrums the moment you turn on the CD player. It’s enough to turn most people off after no more than a second -- it very nearly turned me off, too -- but it would be an incredible shame not to give this album a chance beyond its frightful opening moments.


Because, shortly after the opening steady drone, a few very interesting shifts begin to occur. One of these shifts happens in the listener. As these tones hang in the room and circle around a few times, you begin to acclimate, at home in their strange alien world, content with their presence. Once you’ve adjusted to the track’s peculiar assault (an adjustment that can happen surprisingly fast), you begin to appreciate the other shifts taking place within Stone’s music. As simple and unchanging as this opening track may appear to the casual observer, there is a hive of activity going on within the steady flow of the drone. Stone’s singular tone changes shape almost immediately after its introduction, pitch-shifting subtly up and down and becoming integrated into a broader spectrum of buzzing, humming, and chiming noises.


Stone’s introduction of these new elements is so seamless that it often seems the music is hardly changing, when in fact it’s taken on a whole new character. There are gorgeous hidden melodies poised like barbed traps in this increasingly dense collage, and crackling rhythms nearly subsumed by the greater all-devouring world-rhythm of the circulating drone. Nak Won, it’s interesting to note, was recorded entirely as a real-time performance on the popular Max/MSP interface, and this aspect of live sound manipulation seems apparent on all three of the album’s cuts. There is an off-the-cuff feel to the pitch-shifting, warping, and layering of effects on these songs. It’s not quite playfulness, since much of the time Stone seems very serious about everything he’s doing, but there is definitely the kind of energetic engagement with every sound that can only come from a particularly agile live performer.


This engagement is, if anything, even more apparent on the second track, “Kreutz,” a relatively brief eight-minute interlude sandwiched between the massive 20-plus-minute bookends of the album’s other two tracks. “Kreutz” is a slow, meditative flow of low liquid drones topped by mysterious speaker-shifting creaks and rumbles -- all sourced from a piano, though you can hardly tell. It’s beautiful, especially in the way it takes its time creating a mood from its simple array of elements. The track’s patience and serenity is an impressive contrast to (and come-down from) the preceding song’s dense assault of beeps and sirens.


With the final track, “Darul Kabap,” Stone fuses both of these diametrically opposed approaches in his most compelling epic of electronic manipulation. The track builds slowly on sampled twangs from a stringed instrument, adding frenzied percussion and clipped beats, sampled vocals, hints of Japanese and Middle Eastern traditional music, and who can even tell what else. The track builds inexorably, starting from the meditative groove of the previous cut and working itself up into a sweaty, exhilarating mélange of dancefloor grinds, incomprehensible singing, and sheer noise. Stone lays on the samples fast and heavy as the song builds to its climax, and his live manipulation is nothing short of stunning -- he deftly layers sounds, chopping up his source materials into jittery, stop-start shuffles where there were once thick club beats. It’s a heady shred-job on about a million piled-up dance tracks, a half-hour marathon in a disco club where the record won’t stop skipping and the DJ’s a maniac with ADD. Towards the end of the track, it sounds like Stone’s simultaneously playing somewhere around 20 CDs on fast-forward, as a woman wordlessly croons over the chaos.


At this point, it all makes sense. This transcendence, this wild disco abandon, is what the entire album has been building towards. Roughly twenty minutes worth of crazed pastiche -- so hectic it could only invite flailing arms and staggered steps as a dance in response -- rises completely unexpected from the twangy calm that kicked off the track. This is the odd and totally surprising journey on which Nak Won takes its listeners. We end up very far from the hostile beep-scape of the title track, and further still from the languid mood piece “Kreutz.” These are just hazy blurs in the past by the time you’ve come this far. There’s nothing that can prepare you for this journey, and nothing more satisfying than the first time you take it. Each subsequent moment wipes clean the memory of what came before, making this record akin to a drug-addled nightclub visit; by the end of the night, as the music comes on loud and fast and blurry, you’ve forgotten where you began, who you are, who you came with. It was an exhilarating night, making its impression with emotions and colors rather than concrete memories, and when it’s over you’re left dazed and spit out, head spinning dizzily, happily, whirling away into the waking morning with nothing but some un-hummable tunes stuck permanently in your head.