The three members of Buffalo Daughter are as much sonic collage artists as musicians, and I--their 2002 release and quite possibly their masterwork--can be viewed as both a collection of songs and a serious challenge to accepted norms about dissonance, structure, harmony, and the studio itself as an instrument. Take, for instance, the opening track, "Ivory." An electric guitar slowly unspools a repeating series of minor keys while the three Japanese women gently coo over top. Normal enough, then out of nowhere comes a cacophony of strings, as if a heretofore unnoticed orchestra began warming up in the studio next door. Just as suddenly, an agile violin begins shadowing the guitar's stated melody, then the whole thing just drifts off into the ether. The Yoko Ono-damaged "I Know" finds the women alternately chanting and screaming the words "I know" in no discernible pattern, while the call of a thrush is peppered throughout "Discotheque du Paradis," a track on which almost tribal rhythms introduce the elaborate synth dominating the song's second half. Random strings again pop up in "28 Nuts"--arguably the set's centerpiece and the closest I skates to the fringes of post-rock, while robotic bleeps and burps evoke the chilly world of electronica on the aptly titled "Robot Strings?" (To Rococo Rot fans, take note). Even Buffalo Daughter's straightest tracks invariably contain some element of the unexpected, even if it's as simple as the women's highly accented English. Yet despite its flat-out weirdness, I is more satisfying than annoying. This marvelous aural curio owes as much to what it doesn't have--namely, any relation to almost anything else you've ever heard--as to what it does. --Kim Hughes