Seattle resident William Collin Snively--better known to music fans as Diagram of Suburban Chaos-has done well as a professional composer and sound designer. Yet had that career not panned out, one suspects he might have made his mark as a physicist instead. Or maybe even a wizard. Because on the new full--length Ambit The Album (aka Taco 2), the music of DOSC often seems to defy laws of time and space. The electronic sounds at play are surprisingly tactile--check out the slowly splintering, celery-crisp beats and celestial harp strums of the opening title tune--and layered in a dynamic fashion that generates an ever-moving, three-dimensional realm of sound. Like the myriad cells in any living organism, different melodic ideas intermingle and work together, then drift apart; untroubled by obvious cliches of Western harmony, the five polychromatic instrumentals of Ambit The Album suspend time's forward progress. Fans of early Boards of Canada and Ulrich Schnauss will find much to savor here.

Simultaneously stimulating and soothing, Ambit The Album is a captivating work of music. Armchair career counselors be damned: William Collin Snively definitely made the right job choice.