Noise. A clicking sound, like rubbing two stones together in the palm of your hand. Then a pulsing, throbbing, electric buzz in the distance, like listening to a tugboat from underwater. A synth melody enters with eerie arpeggios, like something out of a horror film. This is “Just Before Waking,” the first track on The Great Invisibles’ album “You Left Me Haunted,” released earlier this year. For a listener new to the ambient/noise styles of music, it’s some pretty bizarre stuff.

My iTunes browser lists the album under the “folk” genre, but I strongly disagree. I wouldn’t even call the tracks on the album songs—they’re something closer to audio puzzles. You can tell they’ve been carefully put together at least once before, but now the pieces are scattered.

“You Left Me Haunted” moves through 11 of these puzzles, culminating in what Invisibles’ guitarist, percussionist and audio engineer Michael Deragon calls “a recording project that eats small planets.” Each track features some sort of distinguishable melody for the ear to latch onto, but the puzzles are in the rest of the composition: layers of noises, recordings of natural phenomena, static, ocean noise, frogs (bullfrogs, I believe), old projector reels, far off discussions and whispers. There are some vocals, too, but not in the traditional sense.

The track “Stars Made of Bones” consists of a rhythmic acoustic guitar line played over a background of tolling bells, static and something like a metal spoon being run around the rim of a steel mixing bowl. Then the whispers start, a female voice speaking suggestive phrases made all the more strange by the digital delay effect through which they’re processed. It’s a creepy song, ending with a tension that begs relief.

Thankfully, it comes after a ballad-type puzzle titled “Evaporate Like a Suggestion,” the folkiest mix on the album. Moving along with a tired but driving pace, the guitar, banjo, tambourine and organ parts provide the background for the vocal track—a voice so breathy it sounds as if it is, indeed, about to evaporate. It’s the first track with an obviously distinguishable major key, and it does wonders for the mood of the album. This quiet relief doesn’t last long, however.

Although the album has already gone through heavier tracks like “Haunted” and “Creeper” (grating tunes that eat away at your ears with altered chords and vocal tracks that sound as if the voice is howling to the moon in agony), the remaining songs are equally haunting—if a bit quieter. “See if I’m Real Too” features an especially eclectic mix of noises, with Middle-Eastern melodic minor guitar lines and ample static tracks laying the background for another breathy vocal lead.

Around this point in the album, some of the static tracks begin to seem a bit redundant, making you wonder if the Invisibles were running out of ideas for background noise. Some songs even seem like recycled versions of the previous tracks. The song “Once Again” is actually just the second half of “At Once,” a slew of quiet diminished chords on a piano backed by the croaking of bullfrogs. Thankfully, the re-use of material doesn’t go on for too long.

“You Left Me Haunted” finishes with “They Will Think You a Coward,” a track more traditional than most on the album, with a rhythm guitar line using full chords backing more of Deragon’s vocals. As much as the song seems a digression from the haunting mood of the album, the nuances in the recording seem to characterize the very essence of the Invisibles’ approach to songwriting. The guitar has an organic, under-produced quality to it, and the occasional dead and dropped notes stand out more as marks of authenticity than imperfections in the playing. The vocal line has no distinct rhythm pattern or rhyme scheme, just a simple melody with lyrics that mesh with the static and guitar line to create a raw sincerity that underlies the entire album. It’s both sparse and intricate, easy to get lost in but complex enough to give a hint of some underlying meaning or purpose.

Deragon, who previously worked with the alt-folk collective The Water Section and free jazz combo Prajna, originally recorded “You Left Me Haunted” in 2006 as part of The Wire’s RPM Challenge, recording most of the tracks at home on a cassette 4-track and then transferring the music to a computer. Filmmaker Michael Winters later edited together a sequence of visuals based on the music, which is included with the album as a DVD.

In The Great Invisibles’ live performances, Deragon is often joined by Juliet Nelson (Tigersaw) on cello, Nathan Groth (Hotel Alexis) on guitar and Michael Palace (Horchata) on electronics. Deragon, who previously taught creative writing and surrealism at a liberal arts college in New Hampshire, is moving to Los Angeles this fall to study sound design and ambient composition at UCLA. 

Deragon only released 300 copies of “You Left Me Haunted,” handcrafting a unique CD case for each and every one. To check out some of the Invisibles’ tunes from the album and some of the band’s RPM Challenge tracks, visit www.myspace.com/thegreatinvisibles.