A lo-fi Frankenstein's monster stitched together from parts of Jeff Mangum, Lou Barlow and Smog's Bill Callahan, this tape-trading team-up between Maryland bedroom auteurs Michael Nestor and Austin Stahl is a veritable garden of indie delights. Hushed and noisy, organic and machine-like, contemplative and volatile, An Audiography of Prohibited Sounds is the kind of record home-recording equipment was made to produce.

Nestor and Stahl (or, by their pseudonyms, Pupa's Window and Private Eleanor, respectively) undertook the Audiography project with experimentalism as their sole guiding principle. Each artist worked independently of the other and was required to come up with compositions in ways he'd never attempted before. There was no collaboration; each worked in isolation, oblivious to what the other was creating. The results -- one 20-to-30-minute slab from each -- are predictably imaginative and disparate, yet make for a surprisingly cohesive whole.

Taking a more song-based approach to his half, Stahl's Private Eleanor material focuses more strongly on melody and songcraft; while the songs run together in a 23-minute chunk, the distinctions between the movements are far clearer than his counterpart's. His Beatlesque magical mystery tour kicks in to gear with the second piece, "Sing You, Softly", which wraps a warped take on the mellotron intro to "Strawberry Fields Forever" around some shuffling lo-fi. Elsewhere, Stahl gets contemplative on the cello-backed acoustic strummer "Your Worried Head". In between his gentle little tunes, Stahl sticks jagged shards of musique concrète like the clicking "Idling Train, Mt Royal Station, November" and the strangely unsettling "Excerpt from Composition for Six Household Appliances". The juxtaposition is jarring -- which, presumably, is the point.

Nestor's side is a different -- more experimental and obtuse than Stahl's work, yet strangely similar. He chooses to begin the Pupa's Window opus with "Track", a harsh glitch-happy mash-up of splintered piano tinkles, garbled police scanner chatter and inane computerized vocalizations. It's a painful listen, but redeemed by the subsequent "By Track", a mournful ditty for piano and voice that mixes nothing-ever-happens ennui with a liberal sprinkling of creeping dread.

Compositionally, the two sides are excellent: shifting dynamics, tempos and moods effortlessly and blurring together into a seamless hour of fragile introspection and stark found sound. Nestor's work is better as a whole, while Stahl's melody-centric songs are stronger as individual parts. It's a cryptic album, perhaps a touch too concerned with coloring inside the lines of its concept, but captivating in its intricacies.