I've only heard a couple of tracks from Coppe''s pre-Nauru output, but the pixie-ish Japanese singer (a sort of hippie Björk on Prozac) seems to have mellowed considerably; here, she mostly eschews her favorite drum and bass beats for lush downtempo grooves and swirling, layered ambience.

For maximum enjoyment, listen to Nauru while you're between states of awareness -- that is, halfway between drunk and sober, or floating over the fence that separates "asleep" from "awake". The album's rhythms, full of rich, resonant Eastern percussion instruments, range from languid to electrified. Rather than driving the songs forward, they seem designed to set a metaphorical "film speed" for Coppe's multilayered dreamscapes; while "Durango" barrels forward like a nightmarish juggernaut at the outer edge of consciousness, "Audiololly" stumbles along on a hobbled breakbeat, leaving smeary light-trails in the air behind it, and "Wombat"'s tectonic progression can barely squeeze out a single rhythmic thump. Liquid-sounding IDM melodies are knitted into crystalline ambient structures, half-recognized melodies surface like out-of-context faces, and striated tunes dissolve into their component atoms -- all intermittently garlanded with Coppe''s sultry-but-unintelligible vocals.

"Flapper Girl", one of Nauru's longest tracks, is particularly memorable; its ambient sprawl is shot through with sampled music and dialogue, submerged beneath an ocean of liquid murk. Like Terry Gilliam's classic film Brazil, it achieves an odd, retro-futuristic balance of dream and reality; it made me imagine a reanimated brain in a nutrient tank, living out an endless dream of an idealized 1922.

Nauru rarely tightens its grip on reality, which makes it a difficult album to truly enjoy if you're in the habit of spending your days lucid and well-occupied. Its presence in your CD player will virtually force you into indolence and sloth, so think carefully before listening at the office. Coppe' probably has more time to spare than you do.