ark E. Smith, The Fall’s marble-mouthed front man, once stated that the secret of song lay in the three R’s: repetition, repetition, and repetition. It’s an adage The New Sound of Number’s Hannah Jones has taken to heart. Liberty Seeds is full of riffs that roll over and into themselves; beats that build and bend backwards until they find themselves at the beginning; and phrases thrown out over and over again, like (hopefully sticky) mud in a political campaign.

The New Sound of Numbers are an Athens, GA based band, whose principal player, Hannah Jones, also plays percussion in the second generation Elephant 6 sextet, Circulatory System. Two of these ex-Olivia Tremor Control members (John Fernandes and Will Cullen Hart) return the favor by appearing on Liberty Seeds (most notably, Fernandes’ violin). A visual artist by day, Jones layers each song with swathes of sound, stealing OTC’s found-sound approach, but eschewing their 60s pop sensibilities for a more post-punk methodology. Only “Good Things Are Coming” comes close to OTC’s psychedelia. If you’re looking for the obligatory Elephant 6 comparison, think The Music Tapes avant-garde adventures.

Percussion dominates, with each song built on chugging steam train rhythms. It’s a hypnotic and hymnal metronomic mash, as abrasive as it is angelic, and as organic as it is robotic. It’s the sound of Stereolab falling down a flight of stairs. With each bounce perfectly timed. Each roll reliably executed. And though drums (and myriad other percussive persuasions) direct the proceedings, they’re more of a binding force than a melody maker—synths, guitars, violin, and the odd kazoo, each crop up to accent Jones’ distant vocals.

Lyrically, the album juxtaposes Jones’ intonation and the rhythmic and robotic music it sits atop. The sweet, often multi-tracked vocals are an angelic antidote to the instruments, which, at times, sound like they were dropped inside a pinball machine. Animals and organisms, living breathing things, rear their heads in several songs. “Tuning the Air” states that “Animals organic systems / Influence our compositions.” One song is called “Minimal Animal,” and several others make mention of nature, flowers, and seeds, sometimes several times within the same song.

Album opener “Frequency Transmission Systems” sets up the repetitive stall. A slightly subdued affair, the steady beat allows Jones (who wrote and arranged all the music) to wax lyrical; part manifesto (“In jumps another dimension / Natural action / Systems balancing / Rewrite the imagination / Energy set for liberation”), part precocious self-help (“In everybody there is a seed that knows the walls holding you will soon dissolve.”) Each line is repeated and reinforced, with the first verse alone fed to us four times. Only at the end of the song do we hear our first un-repeated phrase (“activate”) as if Jones has addressed her agenda and is ready to move on.

As with The Fall, the repetition works, the songs burrow and bore, but, like an 18-inch pizza, Liberty Seeds is difficult to digest in one sitting. Taken as a slice or two at a time though, and it makes for a satisfying whole. On “Experiment #24,” Jones asks: “What are the limits of our physical side?” After listening to Liberty Seeds over the past several days, it sounds more like a challenge than a question.