The history of French electronica is not one that's completely without blemish. On the one hand, you've got the good, groups like Air and M83 that employ a bit of subtlety in their music, to the bad, one of the millions of French electro groups who abuse synthesisers and laptops to create "music" that consists of nothing except a big beat and what sounds like a few MIDI patches that were slapped together over an afternoon on a Windows 3.1 computer using some piece of shareware that you got out of a 1993 computer magazine.

Luckily, Sibsey is not one of the latter, drawing more from the music of Air (and to a lesser extent, Moby and Boards of Canada), than from the sort of trashy club music that is normally associated with Europe. The group itself consists only of one person, Audrey Soyeux, and most of the music fits into the "ambient techno" genre, with a few smatterings of guitar and piano about the place to keep things from ever getting boring.

"From My New Heaven" starts out with Transperancy (Part 1), which starts off with deep, distant percussion that sounds a little bit like the heartbeat that kicks off Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon". This curtain raiser flows into (Into The Silence Of A) Falling Night, which introduces some piano into the mix to give the otherwise almost completely electronic song an organic sort of a feel. Subtle, quiet piano is also at work on Forbidden Attraction, which eschews the plodding drum machine beats of previous songs in favour of some gentler cymbal and hi-hat work.

After all this easy-listening electronica, it would be easy to think of this simply as an album recycling the same idea over and over, but Shall We Dance proves that Soyeux has a few trips up her sleeve. What starts as virtually a solo piano piece suddenly explodes in a shower of dissonance and noise, an overmixed drum loop comes in, and all manner of flanged noise effects start flying about in the background. It only happens twice, and each time it only happens for about thirty seconds, but its enough to change the whole dynamic of the album. Leave Your Lone Shore also throws a spanner in the works, by being the only song here to feature significant lyrics, and it's a fantastic track that would not sound out of place on the radio next to more famous groups.

The rest of the album follows more or less the same pattern though, with electronic noises providing the body of the song and synthesised piano providing the lead. It's not particularly groundbreaking, but it's put together well enough, and there are enough interesting twists and turns in the songs that listening to it never becomes a chore (even on the 8+ minute 9 Months). Given the DIY nature of the album (the coverart is very amateurish, as is the English version of her website), the production is as lo-fi as you might expect, but that won't really stop you from enjoying this.

Given some professional production and a bit more of an expanded budget, I'm confident that Sibsey can produce an album that would rival that of most of her more established contemporaries in the French electronica scene. There is clearly loads of talent here, and whichever record label decides to invest some time and money in Audrey Soyeux will not regret it.