It's hard to believe it's been 10 years now since Pale Machine came out. It feels like just yesterday that I was listening to it in high school and feeling like a whole world of music was opening up in front of me. The album was my white rabbit, and I was Alice, stumbling into a new world of off-kilter pop music, of musical syncretism and sincerity and textures and rhythms and deliveries that tickled my brain like nothing else -- a rabbit hole that I became deliciously, deliriously lost in, one that I've never wanted to climb out of.

And yet, almost a decade into my exploration of the subterranean pop and electronic wonderland Pale Machine opened up for me, bo en's magnum opus has never lost its luster. Something about the way the unusual timbres and wobbly rhythms and strange lyrics and sincere vocals come together like a dense, lush dream -- odd, anxious, playful, bittersweet. Something beautiful and true.