Punkish, eclectic and dubby, 'Shelly' is a testament to Belgian artist Daisy Ray's love of serendipity. "I discovered the joy of expressing myself and making noise with any kind of instrument in an intuitive, improvised way," she recalls. She'd already been making music for a while with collaborators, but working solo gave Ray the opportunity she needed to take risks and develop a more personal musical language. Using Ableton Live, a couple of Roland synths, a couple of drum machines, a bass guitar, some FX pedals, a microphone and a few small instruments, she set about recording feverishly, saving each jam and continuing on to the next. When it came time to put together 'Shelly', she had four years of recordings to pull from, so she took two weeks to revisit the material and reshape it into a bumpy, prismatic narrative.

Many of the tracks she rediscovered were instrumentals, or only had temporary vocal recordings. But during the four years, Ray had performed countless live shows, providing her with the new-found confidence she needed to finish the tracks. She describes this process as finding her voice, and it's her distinctive, versatile vocals that crystallize the album's reflecting pool of ideas and gestures. On the brief title track, she sings impulsively over a sputtering drum machine loop, thinking about a friend who threw her life away and a party falling apart. "There's a thin line between letting yourself go and losing yourself, and it's often the people surrounding you who see when you're crossing the line," she says sagely.

Ray captures the jerky energy of post-punk on 'Think before you talk', looping a pounding beat and nimbly plucked bass notes, and singing expressively over the top. She initially recorded the track on her iPhone, and when she went back to the sketch three years later, she realized she had the loops still saved on her Roland Loop Station pedal. So she went back and recorded a final mix, layering the iPhone recording with the freshly dubbed sounds. 'Butterfly' is completely different, a light-headed, spacious cabaret jam that Ray blessed with lyrics two years after it was recorded. She'd been working with sculptor Chloe Arrouy on a performance about a girl lost in the woods, and marveled at the elegant butterfly the artist had cast in metal. "Follow me, follow my lead," she sings, "I will guide you you'll see, into a space unknown."

Ray's inner world is substantiated on 'Shelly', painted vividly with a viscous sequence of tracks that braid personal asides into theatrical, electronic ceremonies. The closer you listen, the more details emerge, from buried environmental recordings that document her travels, to errant words that Ray often wrote in a meditative state, improvising in gibberish before the sounds became lyrics. Her dreams become our reality, a hypnagogic, half-remembered menagerie of characters, themes and references that sizzle with life.