Album: Tunng

The half-breed form known as "folktronica" is a sort of musical cyborg that many have unsuccessfully tried to master, from Momus - who invented the term - to more recent exponents on the fringes of the nu-folk movement.

The best of these is surely Tunng, who here have balanced the bricolage of glitchy clicks, electronic tones, typewriter taps and sampled sounds with a phantasmagorical, fairy-tale songwriting approach that accentuates the music's folksy roots.

In "Woodcat", a girl is magically turned into a hare for breaking some unwritten local law, and her boyfriend seeks the same transformation so he can be reunited with her. "The Wind-Up Bird" becomes a girl's "new muse/ it made front-page news", the song's pizzicato backdrop adding an eccentric texture to the bed of guitar and strings. A theme of fictive fantasy and metamorphosis seems to link the songs, the allure of storytelling underlined by the typewriter clicking away behind "Jenny Again" and the sampled fragments of childrens' hour telly laid over the fingerstyle guitar of "Stories". It's like Jackanory read by The Incredible String Band. Are you sitting comfortably?

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Woodcat', 'The Wind-Up Bird', 'Stories', 'Jenny Again'

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