AGF

Antye Greie-Fuchs has never taken the easy route -- for either herself or her listeners. As the singer for the sultry German band Laub, she's gladly handicapped the group's crossover potential by sticking to her native tongue. But once you've heard her sing -- mouthing her Teutonic syllables like a mother bird feeding her young -- you'll understand that whatever may get lost in the translation is more than redeemed by the sheer materiality of her breathy growl.

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• Sue Costabile
• Kit Clayton

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For her solo debut, Head Slash Bauch(on Orthlorng Musork, the San Francisco experimental imprint helmed by electronic artists Kit Clayton and Sue Costabile), Greie-Fuchs treats language even more materially, breaking various German texts and the occasional snippet of English into atomized particles. She uses her sampler to make words skip and stutter and employs the digital technique of "time stretching" to draw out syllables like rusty, crumbling springs. Across 22 short tracks, Greie-Fuchs builds an unstable world from these fragments of frozen speech, fleshing them out with bursts of static and flashes of clean digital tones. In most forms of pop music, vocals provide the focal point and music supplies the background, but here Greie-Fuchs doesn't so much reverse that as pulverize it completely, crushing vocals and music into finely ground dust. When recognizable content does sneak through, it turns out to be less expressive than dryly factual. On "Readme," Greie-Fuchs recites, "This readme file contains information and features bugfixes multiply response," before dissolving the banal poetry of tech support into a stream of clicks and gurgles.

On her other projects away from Laub, Greie-Fuchs has distanced herself from conventional electronic sounds, concentrating on installation work (some of which she demonstrated to a class at CCAC last year). While Head Slash Bauch is a stand-alone piece of music, the release likewise conjures an atmospheric sense of space. Greie-Fuchs' drifting constructions sprawl as rootlessly and ominously as inclement weather -- veined with electricity and grumbling in an imaginary tongue.