fa.ce (a

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'fa.ce (a' sounds like a recording made beyond the Contamination Zone - post-apocalyptic folk music that starts out gently but eventually devolves and turns on itself as it filters through the radioactive surroundings. The first track opens cheerfully enough with a duet of sweetly plucked acoustic guitars and a freight train percussive patter, like riding in a sleeper car looking out over acres and acres of corn fields, silos, and fenced-in draft horses.

Soon after this initial foray into the countryside, the ground turns cracked and rocky in places, littered with the skeletons of horse and human alike. The violence that was unleashed has long since burned out, but the scarred and uneven landscape remains. For example, as the second track plays itself out, the guitars slip underneath the quiet crash and scrap of metal and a filmy, electrical drone. Throughout the disc the acoustic tenderness - the soft interplay of the guitars and occasional piano - swims in a haze of chemicals and crackling ozone. It surfaces and drowns in electronic squiggles and bird chirps, cut-up and reshuffled guitar glitches, and the dying pops and hisses of melting circuitry and CPUs.

This ephemeral nature of the sound is echoed in the packaging. Each copy of 'fa.ce (a' is housed in a clear, plastic envelope with the disc information printed on pages taken from stock photography books. The artwork for each unit is distinct, the liner notes dropped into the frozen world of a random photograph. Music and visuals merge into a product that is holistically lonely and melodically disjointed, like something chiseled out of the spirit of tired memories and harmful impulses.