Your camel slows down to a halt along the campfire, the man without hands sits staring at the 27-string guitar laying before him. A woman in a towering day-glo orange turban looks up at you, the snapping firelight reflection licking at her black eyes. "Ardst Thou Pale?" she asks. The handless man puts a straw hat on with his feet. "Busy," is all you can say, opening a hump and removing your saxophone. As you walk away, you hear the camel sneer: "As-if..."

Andrew Robb has created a musical landscape (world, actually) that is so personal, so emotive, that it is hard to talk about in the standard language of a review. So, I won't. Listening to "O.K.", an instrument-al piece, while enduring a trip to the laundromat, I found myself my-self taking a 3-minute spritual journey beyond the rinse cycle and into the whirling eyes of two dryers before me. While driving down Lake Shore Drive to the tune of "Enzyme Fog", I was transported through smoke-filled, fragrant opium dens on an endless, gliding search for who konws what, blowing by two exit ramps before the track ended. You can't really categorize "as-if" as anything, though "extra-chunky mood soup", or "acoustic burnt-wood fudge paste" hints at its texture.

Predominantly instrumental, "as-if" was recorded solely by Robb in his attic; it's amazing what a mind left alone will com up with. The utterly alluring opener "Ardst Thou Pale?" melds a rambling acoustic guitar with a chirping Mandolin, creating a Rai-flavored dance over buoyant, tribal drums (no former band-pun intended). Robb's expressive string work on the fragile "Deemed Inadequate" is aug-mented by strained vocals and a bruised harp. A looping clarinet eases over a bed of stolid, marching percussives on "Busy, Busy, Busy" (a post-modern "Flight of the Bumble Bee"?), and "Wednes-day Night, Feb. 13th" stands as a supplementary scene to Eraserhead; muted steel doors slamming and echoing steaming pipe blasts rumble through his head in anticipatory industrial dreams of Valentine's Day.

Though the break-up of tribe earlier this year was bad news for fans, the debut of Andrew Robb goes far beyond anything the band ever recorded (even "Death Valley Days"). Lop off a dollop of "as-if" and see where it takes you. If you're lucky, the man with no hands might fry you us some camel hash... in a day-glo orange turban.

Illinois Entertainer-Michael C. Harris