A Madison, WI resident since 2000, Samarah seems to be cultivating an image of minimalist elegance; she has put out two brief EPs, both with sparse music and sparser packaging. The former fits loosely into the category of "trip-hop", though it's more trip than hop -- aside from Samarah's despairing, echoing voice, What is Beautiful's vibe is nowhere near the more pop-oriented efforts purveyed by the likes of Portishead and Massive Attack. Instead, it sounds like what you'd hear in your head after the tenth day in a sensory deprivation chamber. The music's glitchy, subsonic bubbling offers only the barest suggestion of melody, leaving Samarah's mysterious vocals as the focal point. Her disconnected reverb-soaked musings, often at odds with the rhythms beneath them, only increase the sense of being lost in an inner wilderness.

Samarah does very well at creating textured mood pieces with a relatively limited palette; the swelling atmospheric pads in "Spark" uplift even as they disquiet. What is Beautiful's first two tracks, "Angel's Face" and "Pale Honey", are similar to one another in their subdued click-beats and repetition of lyrics and phrasing. The disc's closer and title track is its most song-like, as Samarah's singing follows something approaching a conventional "verse" pattern (though it retreats into a phased AM-radio-type effect). At twelve minutes long, the EP is difficult to really get into, so it's hard to recommend it as background music, but it's quite lovely; put it in the CD changer on shuffle, along with your Bowery Electric and Bardo Pond discs, and you won't be disappointed.