Shena Ringo is a 24 year old classically trained musician and ballerina turned popstar from Japan. Her music is just as weird and wonderful as that sentence implies!

Her latest album, Karuki Zamen Kuri no hana (roughly translates as "Chlorine, Semen, Chestnut Flower"--and no I have no idea). It is a masterpiece in the glorious baroque pop tradition of Pet Sounds and Sergeant Pepper's. This is not to say that Ringo doesn't have an highly original sense of melody and composition, because she certainly does, this music is very modern and owes very little to American pop music of the 60s, but instead it means that Ringo has created the kind of pop album full of strange sounds, noise, and sheer exuberance that betrays a rare amount of inspiration and keeps the music sounding weird and beautiful no matter how many times you hear it (think "Good Vibrations" for a common example).

One song in particular, track 5 (I can't read the Japanese!), is a good example of Ringo's approach: it starts off with what sounds like 5 o'clock news theme playing on the tv in the other room before morphing that theme into full bodied orchestration with a darting string section bouncing along to Ringo's vocals. The song finally bounces into an extended coda of a duet between a piano and harpsicord (I think)) that is strangely beautiful.