Avia Gardner’s debut mini-album, More Than Tongue Can Tell, is as lush and listenable as it is hard to pin down. Jenna Robertson’s voice might call to mind an airier Tujiko Noriko or an English-speaking cousin of Juana Molina but it has windiness all its own. Her finely wrought words are embedded in vast multi-instrumental folds that combine quirky quasi-symphonic arrangements in the spirit of Sufjan Stevens and murky dub bass lines that might have been pulled from Avey Tare and Panda Bear’s early records, all filtered and fragmented in a way that might be best compared to Akiyama’s other project, Désormais.

More Than Tongue Can Tell smells like old, yellowed pages, it is faded sepia but sharp in focus. It is Victorian wallpaper on a Macintosh screensaver. It is delicate lace cut out of rusting metal with a drill press. Despite its small size, it is a sprawling work that is gorgeous without being cloying, intricate without being baroque, and is sure to carve out a place for Avia Gardner in the not-sopop world.