In almost every cop film, there's a scene where the unconventional hero cop's boss takes his badge away. If there were such things as Sampled Music Police, I'm sure they'd have taken Elisabeth Esselink's badge away ages ago. I'm equally sure that she wouldn't have given a toss. Solex, you see, breaks rules.

It's hard to describe the Solex sound. Genre associations like "pop", "trip-hop" and "electronica" are wholly inadequate. While Esselink's vocals have a wee bit of Cibo Matto in them, her melodies often sound like a twisted, spliced compilation tape, its segments pureed into a bizarre sonic montage. Having previously busied herself culling her record shop for sample material, Ms. Esselink has apparently been a Solex-About-Town of late, recording a diverse assortment of live musical performances. Rather than simply dumping these recordings onto CD-R and making a modest living as a bootlegger, Solex has done a Frankenstein job on them, sampling and reassembling them into her own unexpected and unorthodox works. The results are somehow more subversive, dodgier, less "girly" than her previous work. While her field recordings may have exposed Ms. Esselink to pop music's traditional rhythmic structures, she has chosen to disregard them in favor of her own skewed take, resulting in disjointed pleasures like "That's What You Get With People Like That on Cruises Like These" and the loungey dreamscape "Superfluity". Sometimes, you'll get the distinct impression that part of a song ("Another Tune Like 'Not Fade Away', for example) is moving forward while the rest of it is moving backward. That's Solex for you. To further confuse you, Solex has furnished these songs with lyrics fashioned from her own imaginary conversations. Each track plays out its own little scene -- it's impressionism, Solex-style. It's not for the staid, the mannered or the Chief of the Sampled Music Police, but it's a nice kick in the pants for your preconceived notions, if you've got the sort of preconceived notions that wear pants.