It's always fun when you can trace your admiration of an album or artist to one very precise moment. A few weeks ago I went to see Mouse on Mars. The ticket indicated only that there would be guests, and I'd heard from the gentlemen at Gate City Noise (an excellent record store in Greensboro, North Carolina, if you can believe it) that a laptop musician from the area would be the opener. His name escapes me now but he did an interesting little set, a bit heavy on the noise and light on the composition, but good enough.

A short time later a pale bald guy with a red t-shirt featuring Cornelius from The Planet of the Apes took the stage. He set up a Powerbook, effects boxes and a MIDI keyboard, and then he cued up a chunky beat with organ chords similar to the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back" at half-speed. The hook on the song was a vocal-like sine tone that seemed like the backing vocals to "Sympathy for the Devil" played on a theremin.

This music was pop and you could move to it, but there was an odd experimental edge that really caught my ear. This guy on stage was definitely feeling his own composition, because he was dancing in place with one hand on the mouse and another on some kind of outboard gear. Then he stepped over to the keyboard and punched out the filthiest, most distorted organ melody I've ever heard-- one catchy as hell that fit the song perfectly. I was captivated.

I walked over to the small merch booth where a beautiful dark-haired woman sat on a stool, the riches of the entire Sonig catalog arranged carefully in the space around her.

"Who is this?" I asked.

"Vairt," she answered in a thick German accent.

Just as I suspected: it was Vert, known to friends in his native Britain as Adam Butler. I knew his latest album was already making its way through the mail to me, so I picked up The Köln Konzert, his fascinating deconstruction of Keith Jarrett's album of the same name.

When Nine Types of Ambiguity finally arrived, I skipped through until I came to the track he opened his set with. It was called "To Doo is to Be," and it was even better than I remembered. It's the perfect combination of wide-eyed innocence and rigorous sound analysis, Land of the Loops sitting in on a Foucault symposium.

This is the direction I wish more electronic music would take: hooks, a groove, and all the tiny sonic reminders still intact. "To Doo is to Be" is one of the breakout tracks of the year for me, no question. And though nothing else on Nine Types of Ambiguity approaches that level of pop, it's still an excellent album of fractured soundscaping, fragile ambience, and yes, songs.

"Blindsight" opens Ambiguity with a glitch-ridden downtempo beat and more gentle organ drones, somewhat conventional but very evocative. The creepy, industrial "This Precious Meanwhile" incorporates Oval-esque skips and feedback, with some buried spoken words rattling around in there somewhere. "The Tide Comes In and Then the Tide Goes Out" has an arrangement close to fusion jazz, something like Isotope 217 if they gave over to the electronics completely.

There's an arresting purity in the simple organ melody of "Somewhere Between Here and Last Week" that seems unusual coming from this camp. In a similar mode is "Last Night from a Bus I Saw," which continues the experiments of The Köln Konzert, setting a stark piano melody against scraping harmonium drones in a manner that recalls the very best of Labradford. The delicate coda is much cleaner, with accordion and pennywhistles marching into the sun.

Vert fits right in at Sonig, occupying a space not far from the gauzy melodicism of Lithops. And like Lithops, any future Vert records are a "must buy" for me. With each purchase, I'm certain I'll think of that red t-shirt and the sound of the merch vendor's voice.

-Mark Richard-San