Tune-Yards, aka Merrill Garbus, is a true original, and an apparent master of her medium: tape music. She's one of those people, like Hendrix was with the guitar, who can take her tool and bend it, stretch it, distort it, and reform it anew. Listening to her debut full-length, Bird-Brains, for the first time was legitimately exciting for me.

It is a truly homespun record, created by Garbus alone over the course of two years, utilizing a small digital recorder. Bits and pieces were collected on this recorder and arranged via Audacity. The record teems with surges of found sounds and brilliant percussion. For instance, one song uses an isolated bit of tape hiss as a drum roll; another captures a child's cough for percussion.

Tune-Yards can be described, reductively, as freak-folk-hop, with embellishes of Afro-pop, yodeling, a steady hip-hop undercurrent, and an unnerving preoccupation with nursery rhymes. Her inventive beats and phrasing aside, Garbus' huskily soulful voice would be enough to make her a sought-after talent in the hip-hop world.

[Northern, Tune-Yards with Xiu Xiu, Christopher Francis and Son, Tuesday, March 23, 8 p.m., all ages, $8, 321 Fourth Ave., Olympia, northernolympia.org]