n Twine’s early releases, the duo seemed to be striving to bring subtle horror-film soundtrack darkness to the precisely sculpted, post-Autechre terrain of IDM. Their 1999 debut, Reference, featured manic, abstract beats and marrow-chilling atmospheres a la Witchman (a British producer who flashed brightly from ‘95-’98 and then vanished) and the evocative use of disembodied voices popularized by Scanner. From this disc as well as the 2001 LP Circulation on Sweden’s Komplott imprint and 2002’s Recorder, you sense that Twine’s Chad Mossholder and Greg Malcolm are serious sound scientists who know their musique concrete and electro-acoustic composers, but also possess the soft-centered emotional capacities of the most heartfelt singer-songwriters. It’s a rewarding combination rarely found in laptop musicians.

Recorder offered a yet more refined, subtle distillation of Twine’s trademark abstract sound. They fed and manipulated guitars and pianos through software, lending an organic poignancy to the oft-sterile laptop-music genre. “None Some Silver” even verged on prog-rock, with its guitar tones stretched and ruptured like a John McLaughlin solo heard through a bad cell-phone connection, while “Touched” toggled between psych-rock bliss outs and Farmers Manual-style fractured circuit-board emissions and distorted, scattershot percussion. Throughout Recorder, Twine fused post-rock and IDM DNA to produce a superior breed of sonic ions whose microscopic actions coalesced into macrocosmic masterpieces of unusual textures and shapes. Much like Oval’s Markus Popp, they found the beauty in fragmentation, the gorgeousness in the glitch. It was, quite simply, clicks & cuts for people who actually leave their computers once in a while and interact with human beings.

Twine’s new self-titled debut for Ann Arbor, Michigan’s Ghostly International is a triumphant culmination of the group’s vision. The disc begins with “G_R_V,” a red herring of a track whose tentative acoustic-guitar picking, static and a mundane phone conversation don’t prepare you for the extraordinary music to follow. But track 2, “Plectrum,” reveals Twine’s unique modus operandi in full flower. Building tension with a tightly coiled guitar riff and a seemingly sedated asylum patient reciting a hypnotic mantra (“Get on, get on, was she?”), Twine deftly weave in subliminal operatic female vocals, haywire electronics, and a sample of a Southern gent discussing guitar and banjo playing. The contrasting voices and instruments create a pleasing cognitive dissonance. On “Piano,” chords from that instrument are tweaked into a luminous digital glow, while a forlorn dirge, like Main scoring a David Lynch western, fills in the background. The track exemplifies Twine’s penchant for crafting beautiful tuneage that struggles through a software-erected forcefield.

Twine’s most interesting tracks feature the vocals of Shelly Gracon and Alison Scola (I can’t distinguish who’s singing on what, but Twine effectively deploy both in their spacious music). Album highlight “Girl Song” sets gossamer vowels floating over gently stuttering and shuddering pulses and plangent guitar twangs, forging some of the most ethereal blues ever. Deeply haunting and mysteriously beautiful, this could be a cyberspace collaboration between Mazzy Star and Ry Cooder. That it ends with spluttering, squealing tones of a Buchla synthesizer on the fritz reveals Twine’s perverse side. Similarly, gorgeous, lamenting vowel emissions that sound like Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard in a cave kick off the 12-minute “Kalea Morning.” Nervous-tic beats and panned cymbal hits with metallic accents point toward Twine’s debt to Autechre, but these traits are tempered by an enveloping Steve Roach-like ambient drone that aligns your chakras free of charge. The striking contrast between hectic rhythmic twitches and darkly tranquil tone floats again displays Twine’s mastery of blending incongruous elements. Another brilliant use of the female voice occurs on “Asa Nisi Masa”; here, an Asian woman repeats the title words over rainfall and a lulling, Harold Budd-like organ fugue. Her sibilance and extended vowel sounds, combined with the slow-blooming dirge, form a hymn for an obscure South Pacific religion that even anthropologists haven’t discovered. It’s utterly mesmerizing.

Pity the people who have to market Twine. This disc eludes easy classification, possesses too many dense layers, and covers too much arcane ground to be reduced to a pithy sound bite. While it contains chillout characteristics, the album also carries subtly disturbing undertones and rhythmic ruptures leaving listeners unable to completely zone out. Ultimately, Twine is best heard on headphones and with a clear head. You’ll need that clarity to absorb the plenitude of rich details Twine magnanimously bestow.