Rara Speaks

Although Los Angeles duo Lucky Dragons sometimes play hipster hangouts like The Smell, they're far from your run-of-the-mill indie kids. Since 1999, Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck have created surprisingly inviting music out of forbiddingly experimental concepts, processing acoustic instruments and found objects until they sound like a mixture of vintage oscillators and radio transmissions from a far-off civilization. Following a decade-long stream of releases on obscure labels around the globe, the Rara Speaks CD compiles three vinyl releases from 2009, on which Fischbeck and Rara explore some downright contemplative minimalist sonic spaces and flirt with world-music exotica on the percussive, trance-inducing "Power Melody" and a number of songs seemingly inspired by the shimmering tuned-percussion sounds of African kalimbas or Balinese gamelan orchestras. Though they take many of their philosophical cues from the Fluxus movement of the 1960s, much of Rara Speaks wouldn't sound particularly forbidding to fans of contemporaries like High Places or Neon Indian. (Note: digital download versions of the album subtract an inessential pair of remixes and add nine bonus tracks, including the endearingly punky "To Lily at Age 15, 20, 25.")