Say you're sitting outside, casually strumming the old guitar, when you suddenly notice that every noise around the porch (crickets, wind) and inside the house (the microwave timer, steps, children) seems to be aimed directly at you. Each element gets louder, softer, starts to fall apart and merge with another -- and then, slowly, your world (or is it just your head?) starts to spin. The guitar in your hands feels heavy, begins to morph beneath your hands, and your fingers follow suit by twisting and creating sounds you didn't think possible, your music becoming one with the sonic ambience. You feel as if you've been whisked away through time; you see glimpses of foreign people and countries. Though you should probably be alarmed, the entire experience fills you with an assuring, peaceful comfort; with this companion, you can put aside judgment and appreciate the beauty in every new surprise that appears. In the end, you find yourself miles from nowhere, but thankful, enlightened and grinning as you make your way home.

No, this isn't the soul's ascension to paradise, a movie pitch, a Hare Krishna pamphlet or even the result of a well-preserved sheet of Snoopy Stamp acid. This is the intimate journey on which Andrey Kiritchenko takes you in True Delusion.

As implied, True Delusion works with more organic subject matter than Kiritchenko's electronica-driven, IDM-ish masterpiece, Interplays, In Between. However, it doesn't matter if his work is dressed up in acoustic guitar and piano or hard drive glitches and beats; the field recording is still at the heart of his work, a musical atom from which he gets a lot of mileage. He digitally enhances and manipulates these slight, almost disposable samples of simple acoustic guitar strums, breathing, wood creaking and "mistakes" (i.e. dropped microphones, the recorded signal pushed too far into the red, the sound of someone fetching a pick that's been lost in the body of the guitar) into the aforementioned surreal yet subtle suspension of belief. On "Illusion of Safety" and "Illusory Self-Motion", he even makes piano scales and a casual performance of a "Chop Sticks"-like etude interesting by turning the instrument inside-out, upside-down, and animating it with literal surgery and beating organs.

Kiritchenko brings these collages to life with a combination of his keen ear, his observational skills and his ability to sensibly mix what he hears outside with what he hears in his head. Ever the brilliant sound artist, he transforms life's seemingly mundane and trivial elements -- including the plain brown-bag CD sleeve -- into an exciting, artistic, seductive vision.