“Brian Ruskin is a Ph.D in Geology (Stratigraphy branch) and at the same time a musician and producer from Pittsburgh, USA”

Maybe it’s a side effect of too many hours spent staring, eyes glazed, at Ableton’s “arrangement view,” but I tend to listen to music with stratification in mind—the way in which different layers of sound correspond and interact. This kind of striated approach can be either wholly reductive (“Ah, the different instruments seem to occupy separate aural spaces”) or incredibly revelatory, depending entirely on the music in question, and the production and arrangement that went into it.

As such, I was naturally curious to find out what kind of sonic stratification would be at play in the work of a bonafide geologist. In keeping with the academic nature of the material, I took some fairly thorough notes:

-On the whole, Backyard Mysteries tenders a nice blend of fashionable laptop jockeying and, dare I say, peripatetic Scandinavian ambient (think: aspects of Riceboy Sleeps, Mum).

-The album is deeply reliant on the shifting temperament of natural sounds (waves lapping, dried leaves crunching underfoot, branches swaying and snapping) that have been reconstituted in a digital headspace—one which alternates between chilly electronic aloofness and amniotic warmth.

- Songs like “Cold Rain Turns Green to Grey”—which you might expect, given its name, to be among the most sterile and dreary tracks on the record—serve to assure the listener that Mental Health Consumer is decidedly not synth-phobic, and features a bouncy, balmy synth loop as its most prominent element (or stratum, you might say).

More after the jump.

- Backyard Mysteries could arguably be described as “fossiliferous IDM,” both for the delicate, half-exposed sonic details embedded in its gurgling ambience, and for the calcified remnants of Mental Health Consumer’s musical progenitors that occasionally percolate to the surface (there’s still life in them bones).

-“Sliding Lines of Sight” rides an ethereal drone straight into the arms of a boisterous, hand-perc-heavy beat. The song is Mental Health Consumer at his most mental—a shizophonic sandwich of effects-chain irreverence that dissolves into the found-sound bustle of a crowded café (also included: deep-bass stabs and skittering hi-hats lifted straight from FM hip-pop). Erratically, this momentary reinsertion of organic noise is followed by the four-minute asylum clang-fest that is “Sleep Cycle.”

- If the record were dronier, LA’s Nudge might be a useful reference point, if for no other reason than the fact that Nudge, comparably, volley between beat-driven and beatless compositions with similar aplomb.

-Ultimately, however, it’s not as deeply-layered as you might expect. To my ears, Backyard Mysteries is less explicitly stratigraphic than the staggeringly dense Our Sleepless Forest album, or any given White Rainbow jam. It’s definitely appropriately mysterious, though, and the most “backyard-y” thing I’ve probably heard since Secret Colors’ Reflections entered my life (believe it or not, I knew the music before the man, and was pleasantly surprised to discover how many friends we shared between us).

Backyard Mysteries is a record that feels spacious and unconfined, while at the same time packed with a bevy of interesting, beard-stroking decisions. There are shades of a more sinister Isirarri on “Reminagined Toy,” and opener Emmaus is an oddball, with tons of unusually juxtaposed sounds, including faint glimmers of coquettish, early-‘80s Vangelis-ness.

You can download the record for free now at net-label Test Tube’s site.