Brainchild of Farshidi Hamidi-Toosi, who plays everything on the album, Turnstyles gets 10 out of 10 in the appropriate title category. Slipping from minimalist piano pieces into breakbeat reveries and dusty trail songwriting, Zirafa certainly has his bases covered. Though in lesser hands the results could be disjointed, or at worst a mess, there's an overarching mood here that holds things together. Like an insomniac radio listener, Zirafa tunes in and out of the static to find a melancholy pulse that transcends genres.

From Thrill Jockey jazz ("7:24 AM") to delicate post-rock ("Snow"), Zirafa has the talent to match his ambition; he's as comfortable cutting up electronic rhythms as he is exploring the ivories. From "Flipcut (pt. 1)"'s tight instrumental workout, which sounds like it's echoing from the doorway of a backstreet bar, to the Shadowisms of "Dark as the Night", the results are uniformly impressive.

Though the shifting songs and narrative mood mean that the album is best appreciated as a whole, the solo piano work is perhaps the most emotionally resonant. On "Waves", the rolling melodies perfectly evoke the subject matter, and the subtle shifts in volume and tempo shine through the bare-bones production.

Through similarly artful playing, "Lost"'s guitars melt into and out of each other, drifting from detached to darkly menacing and back again, as Toosi's reverb-drenched voice harmonizes over the top. The submerged stream-of-consciousness mumblings on "Malaise", reminiscent of Buck 65, sway with sleepy uncertainty, as haunting strings underpin a vocal sample recalling a winter night spent swimming.

Overall, Turnstyles is stylistically intriguing while retaining a coherent overall approach. Like DJ Shadow's Endrotucing or Portishead's Dummy before it, Turnstyles makes a perfect soundtrack to midnight wanderings or late night drives, and though it's not quite in the same league as these heavyweight predecessors, it generates an atmosphere that's hard to resist.