If you're familiar with Brian Hall's previous work, either with the stellar Snake Forcefield or the rootsier Carter's Ghost, Performs in the Dark will probably surprise you. Hall, who previously seemed most comfortable with rigidly constrained and pop-structured pieces, has done an abrupt about-face, setting his songs free from all structural and stylistic limitations. Performs in the Dark may be the simplest music Hall has ever made, but it's also some of the most imaginative and evocative, and definitely the most liberated.

Hall makes no attempt to conceal the fact that Performs in the Dark was heavily influenced by New Zealand's number one minimalist guitar wizard, Roy Montgomery -- a guy who can stretch a single note into thirty reverb-soaked minutes without wearing out his welcome. Montgomery likes to suspend every tone in space as if trapping it in heavy liquid, stretching each sound to a gauzy smear of texture and emphasizing the richness of individual notes and tones over any sort of melodic complexity. Hall has the style down pat, particularly on "Finding Content in the Turbulence (theme explored)" and, rather obviously, "Approaching Montgomery"; his notes spill from the speakers like a gentle exhalation. Listening is the definition of languor -- as if you're lying on your back on a raft in a swimming pool whose water is precisely ten degrees below your body temperature, counting stars in a brilliant night sky. Guitar strings are stroked, tweaked, tapped, even squeezed, eliciting skeletal reverb rhythms and chords sustained by their own blurry momentum.

Fortunately, Hall is too much his own artist to spend an entire album playing in someone else's garden. If the first few tracks of Performs in the Dark show Hall's attempts to "try on" Montgomery's fluid style, the remaining tunes let him give it his own spin. Tracks like "Ditch Lights Pulsating" gradually encompass elements of Americana-tinged rock and pop -- structured melodies and progressions that, divorced from their ethereal surroundings, would function quite effectively on a Snake Forcefield record. This isn't particularly surprising; Snake Forcefield's more effects-intensive pieces pushed steadily in a Wilco-meets-My Bloody Valentine direction, and Performs in the Dark merely approaches them from the opposite horizon. It's a dreamy, womb-bound variation on modern pop, filtering everything from post-rock (the string-stretchingly cinematic "As The Fair Invaded The Grocery Store Parking Lot, Hurt, Summer 1983") to KLF-style ambient noodling ("Finding Content In The Turbulence") through Roy Montgomery's infinitely laid-back aesthetic, and somehow coming out slightly more relevant -- on this side of the Pacific, at least. "Sunday Out My Window Taping Clouds Of Grain", in particular, should fit readily into the American musical experience with minimal pushing and prodding.

This is a risky venture for Hall, but fans who embrace this threadbare, recursive sound will discover a universe of minimalistic sound beyond Hall's own work. Performs in the Dark will only be a revelatory listen for those who assumed the artist incapable of such fringe diversions. The rest of us will enjoy it most just as it was performed -- in the dark.