Kurt Kothals, who records his unique brand of strange yet accessible electronica under the name Buddy System, grew up working in Alaskan logging camps, then studied computer science in Texas. Perhaps it's the sharp disjunction between the environment of his early years and that of his young adulthood that has led to his musical style, which is glitchy in tone and texture and yet surprisingly warm and human, and often downright gentle. His third full-length album finds him continuing to refine his highly individual sound, which generally consists of small, trebly breakbeats that skitter lightly across the top of samples and keyboard parts that alternate between the softly anarchic and the harmonically cathartic. The best example of the latter is the stunningly beautiful "Live 27dec01 Pt. 2," which follows a convoluted but intuitively perceptible harmonic logic; the best example of the former is "Tom Told Me Pt. 2," in which harmonic chaos is held together, barely, by a thread of jungly rhythm. On a few other tracks the center doesn't hold quite as well, but the album has an overall feeling of very carefully constructed imperfection. Recommended. ~ Rick Anderson