Last time I saw Chantal Passamonte was in a club in Valencia, Spain. She held a thin flashlight between her lips as she meshed together the moaning Bowie choir from side two of Low with the percussive thumps of her Warp labelmates, Boards of Canada. It was a wonderfully woozy night, and she DJed with a deft touch, moving in and out of the vinyl grooves, merging sundry vibes and keeping the headspace at a nice high. Fringing Field In Microstrip Patch Antenna Projects.

The big balls of Spanish hash making their way around the room didn't hurt things, either, heads nodding within blissful alpha states. That was years back, and I wondered what she'd been up to this whole time. Her latest effort for Warp shows she's been doing basically the same thing as she was that night, looking for the perfect dream state rather than the perfect beat. It's all about the mix, a steady shifting of textures and unobtrusive rhythmic circles that careen like spinning plates, their centers slowly wobbling, deteriorating as the next pattern begins to assimilate and congeal. Skimskitta opens with some e-bowed guitar and glitch noise, before moving into the unadorned piano and rasping breaths of 'Poussou'.

The beats don't formally appear until track three, 'Woody', and they quickly skitter and dribble away like mercury as the gongs resonate, her low-mixed voice drifting in and out of consciousness. 'The Wolf, the Sheep, & the Door' is slightly more kinetic, conjuring up the deep drums of Haruomi Hosono's Cochin Moon while simultaneously working out the combination on a safe, ticking away, slowly immersing her vocals in a salty ocean of fizzling crackles. As it flows downstream, you become aware of far-off echoes of gamelan percussion coming from the overgrown databanks of this river, as well as the innocent tricklings of keyboards, leading slowly into the record's centerpiece, 'I May Be Over There (But My Heart is Over Here)'.

Calix mixes together guitar feedback, wind chimes, and her almost untraceable voice as piano recital patterns return to awkwardly move it along. This boat doesn't go anywhere, merely floating and turning in place, but your head spins nevertheless, blissfully discombobulated. 'Paarl' and 'Shadenfreude' feature Mira's vocals, but once again they remain far too low in the mix, making me wonder whether she doesn't trust her voice, or is trying to make a subliminal mix-tape. The harmonium and organ accompaniment flow well with the clicking beats, but from there the album submerges into blurry, indistinct washes, as individualized tracks give way to Calix's mutability, stirring the percussion and digital debris about, never letting the bits quite settle to the bottom nor revealing her recipe. Skimskitta isn't particularly strong or potent, but it's relaxed and smooth enough to induce a very mellow, mild buzz.