At Night

Ben Monder might be best known as a jazz guitarist and the vocalist Theo Bleckmann has collaborated with a number of New Music and jazz artists, including Meredith Monk, but *At Night* is a hard-to-classify — and haunting — disc. The album, which incorporates electronics and improvisation, has a spare quality that might be called minimal if not minimalist, and also hints at Brazilian music but doesn’t really sound quite like anything else. Monder takes strikingly different approaches to playing the acoustic and the electric guitar. The lovely opener, “Late, By Myself,” features fluttery acoustic patterns evocative of psychedelia and flamenco and an intriguing vocal melody. But on “Apocryphon,” he constructs ambient rock that recalls Neil Young’s score for Jim Jarmusch’s mystical western *Dead Man*. Guest percussionist Satoshi Takeishi brings subtle touches to a handful of the cuts, including an entrancing version of Joni Mitchell’s “Sunny Sunday.” The entire album possesses a slowed-down sense of time that creates its own space.