Though Soulo's debut mini-album incorporates far more non-electronic instrumentation than is typical of a Plug Research release, it stays well within the label's signature aesthetic. Plug Research specialize in exploring the conceit most elaborately and superbly generated by Low Res' Approximate Love Boat album.

The conceit postulates that intrigued extraterrestrials have traveled from their home-world to collect samples of terrestrial broadcasts. Having scooped up and stored Earth's many emissions, the aliens' data storage units collapse during the decades' long journey back to their home planet. Rather than return to their alien government or ET National Science Foundation with nothing but corroded memory chips to show for their efforts, the aliens try to remember what the sounds of Earth were and create recalled approximations.

This Guy de Maupassant-meets-Arthur C. Clarke conceit is a useful compositional tool. It forces musicians to look askance at the sounds and structures we've become so accustomed to hearing and processing every moment of our lives. Successfully applied and realized, the trope will necessarily lead to original assessments of clichéd styles.

In the case of Low Res' Approximate Love Boat, lounge jazz and exotica were recalled as naïve but definitely deformed globs of sound. Soulo's alien reading of acoustic post-rock results in an instrumental version of Palace Music's Arise, Therefore, reconstructed for the palm-pilot set. Once this 30 minute disc has ended, you've no choice but to believe Soulo's statement that they left art school the day after computers arrived. Soulo isn't an acoustic approximation of electronics; it's more like a cozy symbiosis between wood and wire.

Beginning with a resurrected version of the ascending tones that accompany the boot-up of a Windows-operated PC, "This is the Same as It Always Was" crawls out of the same dubspace that Tricky staked as his own. Yet, rather than using his record as a podium for a skunk-powered rant against the industry, the creeping melody abducts you and leads you into a realm of previously unencountered shapes and forms. At points, you'll recall the bridge noises of U.S.S. Enterprise; at other points, you'll wander into the peaceful places that the Third Eye Foundation have hidden from all but the most persistent explorers.

"This is the Same as It Always Was" segues into the far brighter and briefer "Transtician," which delights in repeating a flute trill and a doorbell, a cyborg burping and a sonar contact before jumping into a rolling Billy Cobham Spectrum funk until fading into white noise. Out of that fuzz comes the gorgeous "Rubberbands," which is exactly how I've longed to hear Ultramarine's "Every Man and Every Woman is a Star"-- in the breezes of an Appalachian early evening.

The American bucolic of "Rubberbands" switches to "24 Hours on the Phone," a misnamed pastel portrait of machinery clunking, pounding pigs of iron. But even amid the industrial plods, Soulo kiss tenderness into their track by letting their digital approximation of a lap steel frolic unbound and daisy-chained. The distant, unwilling-to-be-touched "Whatever You Want" is Bowie's "Warszawa" by Marimbas and Other Mallet Instruments from Outer Space.

"See You Tonight" rocks back and forth on its heels like a feisty battle-taunting schoolyard pugilist greedy for a doffing, and "Simple" emerges from squalls of AM-radio static into Arovane's Tides as covered by Aerial M. Closing the album the only way they could, Soulo reach the peak of their conceit with "Bouna Fuck You," during which Visage's "Fade to Grey" beatbox takes a brief futuristic neo-Americana buggy ride, observed from on high by the lazy-hawk swoops of an ersatz lap steel guitar.

Soulo's brief debut is refreshingly devoid of Kid606's nose-bleeding, stochastic destruction, and also of the inflexible algebra that Tortoise have adopted. Soulo might well be content to sustain their label's aesthetic, but I hope they'll eventually break away completely. This is one band who should really persuade Robert Wyatt to collaborate with them. Wyatt's wistful experimentalism would perfectly compliment Soulo's own future-bucolic, and the promise that was dangled in front of us with Ultramarine's United Kingdoms will at last be clenched in our sweating palms.

-Paul Cooper