stonian Ramo Teder recorded his second album in a small village on Finland’s west coast, where he says that the mornings last 33.33 minutes longer than in the rest of the world. That’s why his second album under the Pastacas moniker lasts 44.44 minutes. Does that make sense?

However international our world seems to be getting—you can get hold of new releases from thousands of artists every day—there are plenty of reasons why music sometimes fails to translate across cultures. If you’ve ever tried to sing a song in a foreign language, you’ll know that language is the biggest.

I had been traveling through Eastern Europe for several months when I first heard Tsaca Tsap at Dense Records in Berlin so I was surviving in a blur of language. Still it was disorienting listening to Pastacas. He writes his own lyrics, but it’s virtually impossible to say in what language, he borrows words from Estonian, Finnish, and even throws in his own made-up vocabulary.

Post-processing further obscures the already murky verbiage. His words are layered, cut up, looped, and slowed down to a narcoleptic pace. It’s the sentiment and emotions conveyed by the vocals that seem to be important, rather than the literal meaning of the words.

The resulting tracks aren’t so much songs as flights of whimsy. The 16 short instrumentals and vocal pieces recorded over the past couple of years have a ‘60s folk feel, though it’s hard to exactly put your fingers on the lineage. Little snippets of vocals and guitar, sudden changes in focus within a track and shifts in speed that seem to have as much to do with Akufen as Tim Buckley. Despite the electronic elements and choppy production, the song structure and the stark lines of acoustic guitar remind me of the elder Buckley’s album Lorca.

Teder played all instruments—guitar, bass, and flute combined with electronics—and his voice gives the album an almost bossa nova lightness, and an intimacy missing from many electronic albums. Although the album has pieces of squiggly acid, breakbeat, and folk it never feels patched together. Instead, it all becomes part of the Pastacas Puzzle, fitting seamlessly into his kooky vision of the world.

The warm sound of a heavily processed voice, the light splash of percussion, the twang of his acoustic guitar put under the spotlight so that you can hear the entire whip of the guitar string like Robin Hood thwacking back his bow to smite an evil sheriff. The Estonian word Pastacas translates roughly to ‘biro pen’. The implement is a good metaphor for the textural way Teder approaches his music.