Radiohead has helped to shape contemporary music in any number of ways, but with the release of Kid A in 2000, the Oxford band managed to make millions of listeners receptive to and even genuinely interested in music that bordered on the experimental. What was once confined to the avant-garde and readers of The Wire suddenly found itself in, or at least remarkably close to, the mainstream.

Being something of a prude traditionalist myself, I've never quite found enough room in my heart to fully embrace the experimental, even Radiohead's slightly tamer version of it, though I have tried my hardest to remain open-minded. Because once in a while a release that falls squarely in the experimental category will prove to be accessible, rewarding and at times poetic, even if it does succumb to the parade of bombast – also known as bullshit – that passes for creative genesis and artistic explanation in these postmodern days of ours, viz. the description of Ethan Rose's work as "an exploration of order and accident; meandering consonant sounds that stretch the confines of the object's original intention." Rose's Ceiling Songs is just such a release.

Originally issued, like the Portland, Oregon native's earlier The Dot & the Line (2005) and Miniature & Sea (2004), as a limited edition vinyl run, Ceiling Songs has found its way onto CD after some minor acclaim, not least of which came from Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche. It's not hard to see – or hear, or feel – why. There is, for all their abstraction and controlled chaos, a human warmth and fragility to these three untitled "songs," one that comes from Rose's use of modified musical antiques – "taped up player piano rolls, broken music boxes" – to generate the sounds he later augments and digitizes. The fact that there are familiar tunes like "Jingle Bells" and "Happy Birthday" (heavily altered, of course) buried in them might help establish that connecting filament that so often goes missing from sound artistry. They seem less removed and distant; not like cold mathematical puzzles or exercises in sonic anarchy, but linked somehow to our own half-remembered personal experiences.

The first track consists of two interwoven threads: one a soothing music box that eventually morphs into a smothered piano, and the second a nervous, creepy succession of reversed ticks and taps and alien static. It advances and recedes by turns, at times fading to an ominous hush and then swelling rapturously. There are recognizable sounds stashed throughout, some perhaps real, some definitely imagined: playing hide-and-seek in the summer twilight, a deserted beach in mid-afternoon, cars honking on a neighborhood street. The second track, much shorter, is an ambient mélange of tones dropping like intermittent rainfall and mechanized shifting noise in the shadowy background. It's quite soothing, really, and not so far a cry from Radiohead's sonic forays. Clocking in at a full nineteen minutes, the third and final track is, despite its length, generally the most song-like on the disc. It's not difficult to imagine one of the dozens of indie pop frontmen – Colin Meloy, Conor Oberst, Ben Gibbard et al – using parts of this slow, brooding soundscape for side-project material and laying down a wistful vocal track on top. While I can't recommend Ceiling Songs universally and unequivocally, it will, I think, be a pleasant surprise for those who have repeatedly tried to approach the experimental but always found it too abstruse and alienating. – Eric J. Iannelli (2006, The Daily Copper)