It seems to me that, this far along in the history of music, the only boundary left to be broken is  listenability. With people destructing nearly every sound and mashing them up, all you can really do to distinguish yourself is make your product unpalatable. Believe me, plenty of bands take that route - knowingly or otherwise.

All the same, I still find myself caught off guard by Tune-Yards, aka Merrill Garbus. She's 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.

"All of these things are coming into play, for sure," says Garbus when asked about the mixing of these sounds. "And I think it's not one sound. I think it's whatever kind of music is influencing me in the way I need it to."

Recently, Garbus signed with 4AD, and a second record is soon expected to be in the works. In the larger playground of a real recording studio, there's no telling what kind of product will emerge, but I'm eager to experience it. If one thing can be said for sure about Tune-Yards, it's that we've yet to even see Merrill Garbus fully blossom.

[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]