This Seattle-based sound artist's classical training comes through in the care she takes in arranging her songs -- or perhaps they're better described as statements, for they are not idly contrived. Ex Vivo features Von KleinSmid's carefully conceived critiques on society -- she creates sonic interpretations of emptiness, anxiety and conflict to illustrate her observations on culture, science and modernity.

Many of Von KleinSmid's compositions are self-evidently titled. In "Idle Chatter", two high-pitched tones twitter competitively for prominence, an exercise in digital nattering designed to illustrative how very uncommunicative communication can often be. "The Rats in the Walls" is self-descriptive, droning for 13 minutes full of continuous rumbling, echoing and bellowing. The question posed in the title "What happens to the deep-sea divers" is answered in the track's flailing swaths of sound and seemingly endless murkiness. The tones sound as if they were funneled through countless leagues of distance and distortion. The tracks on which Von KleinSmid's intent is less clear -- "Ethereal Tether"'s submerged, distant mechanization, or "Sphere of Interest"'s electronic croaking and whistling -- are not as successful.

Von KleinSmid orchestrates naked, trembling sonic landscapes full of sharp, craggy peaks and bottomless depths. Her work isn't for everyone, but it's definitely provocative.