Once I was a little boy. I listened to records all day and all night, and sometimes I stopped to sleep. Any time the stereo sprang to life with the sounds of Charlie Rich, Willie Nelson and Friends, Barry Manilow or the Little River Band, I would run to the speakers, arms outstretched, and exclaim, "Are those the beautiful strains of muuu-sic I hear?"

Ensemble were little kids once, too. Olivier Alary was 11 when he was given his first tape recorder, but instead of simply listening to it, Alary one-upped my mundane existence by recording artful sounds like radio waves, outside noises and his sister. And vocalist Chanelle Kimber was apparently a much weirder child than either of us, as she was more interested in the noises made by her hair dryer than by actual music. (This information comes courtesy of the band's press kit and is likely greatly exaggerated to make the band members seem less like ordinary people, which they undoubtedly are.)

These days, it seems all I ever hear are the strains of music-- or occasionally, the strains of TV-- and they aren't always beautiful. Sometimes they're ugly. No one wants to hear the ugly strains of music. Ensemble seem to understand this. They're not interested in creating the musical equivalent of an acne-scarred, bottle-clinging divorcee. Instead, they draw from the current ambient electronic acts of the Warp and Mille Plateaux stables, and add layers of gentle female vocals in unconventional harmonies. Their music is atmospheric without spaciousness, and memorable without resorting to saccharine pop hooks.

The music on Sketch Proposals is most closely comparable to Boards of Canada or Two Lone Swordsmen in their mellower moments-- it's squirm music in its purest form. Analog tones glow radioactive green, skittering digital static blooms sporadically from the rumbling soil, and generated pings drop from mutated leaves like spores, planting new sound. About half the time, this music exists on its own, cycling through a series of warm fluctuations. At other times, two Chanelle Kimbers show how this environment responds to a human presence.

Kimber is almost always accompanied by another layer of her own vocals-- one on each speaker channel, and both recorded at exactly the same volume. The Kimbers play off each other, only together forming a solid melody over Olivier Alary's rococo-rotting. And for the majority of the disc, this is what Ensemble offer us. It's a rare event when Sketch Proposals veers off in another direction, though it does happen for a moment on the record's 11th track when Ensemble decide to try their hand at pop music fueled by these elements.

Irritatingly, to your everyday consumer, these tracks have no names. Only in the album's press kit are we informed that these songs are titled "Proposal 1-12." When artists pull this kind of left-brained stunt, it's invariably a sign of laziness that, at best, seems tossed-off and pretentious. It's mostly instrumental-- how much easier could it be to come up with song titles? But this is a minor annoyance that doesn't affect the music, which is genuinely intriguing, if in need of some more variation. Still, maybe I should be thankful for what I have, and glad that when I reach for music, I have more than my parents' Tony Orlando and Dawn records to choose from. Ohh, Tony Orlando and Dawn... suddenly, this seems like genius.

-Ryan Schreiber