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Austria's Mego label is so associated with professorial audiophilicism — having given the world the high-brow/low-brow digital-dickery of General Magic, Fennesz, Farmers Manual — that Peter Rehberg feels the need to guarantee this record "100% nerdy glitch boy free." Essentially, it's a simple trick on the part of pop-art sister Tujiko Noriko: cute Japanese girl, with a twinkle of her Tabitha nose, makes boffin music cute. But if you bother to look beyond this superficial label, you'll find one of the year's most surprisingly deep sets. Amid slow-thunk beats treated to varying levels of distraught dissonance, Noriko flutters drones and clicks, faux piano and twee key-tones, desk buzz and found sound, Zen-like guitar squeals and crackly string samples — all the while singing in a quiet voice that's equal parts caprice and melancholy. Shojo Toshi is just as complex emotionally, its looming presence never so easily definable as "dark," "out-there," "relaxing," "provocative" or "sweet." It's one of those rare albums that elicit different emotions at different times, offering new glimpses of soul littered across a set whose stature grows with each subsequent spin.
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