NEW Bjork, new Bjork, the Icelandic chameleon changes more often than traffic lights.

So much so that like film director M Night Shyamalan and his need to twist again like he did last summer, the experimentation can distract from the soul of her art.

So, for her seventh solo album, she has thrown everything away including the kitchen sink - "instruments are so over," she says - to rely solely on her startling voice, complemented by the layered vocal sounds of Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis, The Roots' human beatbox Rahzel, Robert Wyatt, Japanese singer Dokaka and a 20-voice choir. "Where are the songs in all this mess?" she wondered, before stripping away all instrumentation, and to be truthful, at first they are still more difficult to pick out than stars on a foggy night.

However, Bjork's stark musical audacity rewards the listener's perseverance, and if you were entranced by her performing Oceania at the Olympic Games' opening ceremony in Athens, then unlike Paula Radcliffe you will be rewarded for completing the uphill course.

As with Bjork, Mara Carlyle has produced her own record, a debut album initially recorded on four-track in between her nightshifts in hospitals and hostels. She shares Bjork's combination of the sinister and the serene, and the lovely, lonesome Lovely is very much Bjork without the budget: innovative, quirky, austere and questing.

Updated: 08:51 Thursday, September 02, 2004