Let's get one thing straight right off the bat. MIJ � aka Jim Holmberg � does not yodel. Yodeling is a learned technique that requires the ability to slide between singing from the chest and from the throat, moving between the two while leaping intervals. It requires control over the epiglottal stop, closing the throat with a hiccup while moving into a falsetto. Most people have imitated it, but that doesn't mean they're doing it right. (And while the table is being set, let us mention that while MIJ may be an astrologer, it's not entirely evident from his record. For some true avant starch-art pop, search down Harvey Sid Fisher's records.) What MIJ does is warble. He peppers his songs with falsetto screams. Not the same thing.

Which is not to accuse MIJ of selling a beat bag. When his set of reverb-drenched hippie folk songs was originally released in 1969, it was titled Color by the Number. He may or may not have been yodeling when ESP-Disk founder Bernard Stollman stumbled on him in Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Either way, he was reportedly playing and singing the sounds he'd heard ever since fracturing his skull in car accident. Stollman promptly booked him for three hours studio time, and Holmberg's place in history was reserved.

And it is a little place in history he has. The album is a curious, funny yet enjoyable time capsule. His sopranino hiccoughing and outer space love songs are a product of the time when Marc Bolan was still singing about unicorns. The slap-back on his acoustic guitar is cranked so high it almost sounds like there's someone else playing along. And it, of course, ends quite epically with the 8-minute "Look Into the (K)Night," a song so wide-eyed that the listener is forced to realize that not only did boy hippies make such mythic declarations of true love, but girl hippies presumably must have lapped it up.

Or if they didn't, today's freak folk boys and girls might well drink from the trough. The CD issue drops in alongside Jandek on a chipper day, or Devendra Banhart after downing a lot of cough syrup � the good shit, the stuff they don't make anymore.