There is probably no better vantage point from which to survey these two shrouded realms than the faerie bridge that connects them, but although I claim we could have deduced the bridge's existence, Anja Garbarek is the first person I've encountered who appears to know exactly where it is, and how to negotiate it safely. There's a certain geo-cultural logic to this, as Garbarek is Norwegian (the daughter of ECM saxophonist Jan Garbarek), and Norway lies, if we don't get too pedantic about proportions, right between Stina Nordenstam's Sweden and Björk's Iceland. Her synthesis of their styles (for which I imagine producer Marius de Vries should share some credit) consists primarily, it seems to me, of deploying Stina's reserve to reign in Björk's tendency to get carried away with her own costuming, and harnessing Björk's self-confidence to drag these songs out of what might otherwise be ethereal stasis. Thus parts of "Beyond My Control" are stark and intimate, but the choruses turn obliquely seductive, like an ice sculpture of Kylie Minogue's "Jump". Thus "I.C.U." opens with eerie, creaking noises and a brittle, swirling drum loop, but then kicks into a decisive and progressively less stark dance-groove over which Anja's muttered narration sounds more menacing than haunted. "Just One of Those Days" is spectral, but soothing, like a cross between Jean Michel Jarre's "Zoolook" and Kate Bush's "Army Dreamers" reincarnated as one of the slower songs on Madonna's Ray of Light. "Picking Up the Pieces" may be a minor millennial masterpiece, grafting robotic, "Pop Muzik"-esque vocals, Lene Lovich squeaks, slinky snake-charmer whir and sinister ambient noises onto a relentless bass-and-drum crunch that wouldn't be too out-of-place on an old Public Enemy record. "The Cabinet" is blurry and distracted, like an Expressionist carousel dream, and the fractured, ominous "Something Written" coalesces into distressed scat with evident reluctance, but "Strange Noises", despite a percussion track that sounds like it's being performed on the neighbor's plumbing and Laurie Anderson-like interstitial monologues, crashes into concussive, careening, industrial choruses that underscore, for me, Nine Inch Nails' essential harmlessness. "The Telescope Man Says", abstract, undulating and unhurried, sounds like Stina Nordenstam being coached (goaded?) by Lida Husik, but "She Collects (Stuff Like That)" (how much better the title would have been without the parenthetical clarification) is impish, post-apocalyptic Marilyn Monroe, like a cabaret theme for Nude Descending a Staircase. And "Balloon Mood" itself, the finale, with its quiet, rustling strings and fragile lullaby vocals, sounds to me like a soliloquy for a derelict alternate-history Titanic that somehow resurfaced, after ridding itself of passengers, to continue on a voyage in which only hulls and icebergs would have interest. Lined up, Balloon Mood, Björk's Post (I never managed to embrace Homogenic, I admit) and Stina's Dynamite (after which People Are Strange, despite qualities of its own, seemed anticlimactic to me) seem to trace an Orion's belt, of sorts, in the constellation of human responses to manic internal cacophony. Björk tries to inhabit it, and so possess it; Stina tries to phase-cancel it, in order to hear the signals it usually drowns out. Anja, in between, offers what to me is an appealing compromise: the elements of dementia in each of our personalities are neither the secret language of truth or the enemy of it, they're a harmony part in a scale whose temperament we badly need to learn.

The second thing that informed Enemy, then, was the show itself. The Boston date was a Wednesday, and Kristeen appeared in the middle of a three- or four-band bill with whose other participants she shared absolutely nothing. I think I was the only person who was there to see her, although a few other people seemed to be paying attention by the end, and perhaps they were just shy, not new converts. Most of the tracks on the album reprise the keyboards/bass/drums arrangement of Meet Miss Young (and one even includes guitars, which the credits to Meet Miss Young decry with some vehemence), but her streamlined touring ensemble consisted of her, one keyboard (mounted off-center on its stand, which worried me throughout the performance), and drummer Jeff White. On a couple songs she simplified the equation further by setting the keyboard into an unattended sampler loop, leaving her free to wrestle her microphone stand back and forth across the stage, while singing, in what I imagine seizures become with enough classical ballet training. Her songs seem angular enough on disc, but I assumed some of the angularity was a studio artifact; her performances suggest that this may not have been the case, blasting through labyrinthine vocals parts that most people would record, at least, in several passes, as if their contortions were as inevitable as the curve of the Venus de Milo's thigh. I forget exactly what she was wearing, but the only explanation I could think of for it was a conflation of Rizzo from Grease, Pippi Longstocking and Kathleen Hanna, whose political significance, I'll concede, eludes me. She had on a sweat jacket at the beginning, which she took off two songs in to reveal the words "Obligatory" and "Tattoo" written boldly, in the aforementioned Magic Marker, down her arms. This could easily have been a throw-away rock joke, except the words were written much larger than they ever would have been as tattoos, and she played the remainder of her set without making any reference to them, which gave the gesture a bizarre confrontational intensity I was intrigued to not quite understand. She was on stage for no more than half an hour, if that (six songs? seven?), and made no attempt to interact with the audience (such as I was) before, during or after.

Her brusque stage presence and the postcard's obsessive cheeriness seem nearly irreconcilable, but somehow between them they've dispelled whatever kept me from feeling connected to Meet Miss Young, and Enemy is now quickly starting to feel like an album I've been listening to for years. At its most strident extremes, like the sawing "Year of the Woman", the shrieked "Take Me" (when you realize, as you usually need the printed lyrics to, that most of these songs explore grim gender and self-image predicaments on the emotional order of the numb "Take me. / Take my hand. / Place in your pants.", the lack of concert eye-contact becomes less mysterious), the cycling "Mouth to Mouth" and the grinding "Have you ever worked with anything HI-TEK?" (with the furious rejoinder "Have you ever worked with anything LO-FI?"), Enemy seems almost self-defeatingly monolithic, like a rally speech delivered as performance art, so you can't quite tell what the cause is. Far more often than not, though, Kristeen punctures this alienating severity with either shards of unexpectedly confident rock grandeur, moments of terrifyingly direct honesty, or both. The clanging piano lines of "Year of the Woman" (a conflicted rant against, I think, formula feminism, but I'm really not sure) sound like Jerry Lee Lewis raised on the Fibonacci sequence instead of the blues, but "Night Blindness", with its surging bass line and quick, clattering drums, sounds to me like an accelerated reduction of Tori Amos' "Jackie's Strength". "I'm Sorry" seethes like a remake of the "Voices Carry" video in which Aimee Mann rips the theater apart at the end instead of just standing up and looking forlorn. Musically, "Lucia" is relatively sedate, Kristeen's closest approach to a Ray of Light reverie, but the lyrics are like Alanis Morissette's "Joining You" recalibrated for sedition instead of comfort. The graceful "Laurel", on the other hand, which reminds me musically of Kate's "Mother Stands for Comfort", is an inspiring hymn of detractor-ignoring encouragement ("Laurel, live in a sound-proof booth. / Laurel, lock out their words"). The sweeping confessional "Sacrifice" is somewhere between Sinéad O'Connor and Paula Cole, the buoyant "The Good Night" closer to Eve's Plum. The weird Toni Basil-ish joke-voices of "Incubator" conceal an anti-reproduction diatribe that would drive Right-to-Life to apoplexy ("If something's growing inside me / I call it a tumor", "I can't spare a drop of life. / I need it to live this life."), and I suspect would elicit little pro-choice support, either (recasting the nursery-rhyme couplet "I'll stick in my thumb / And pull out the plum" as a description of an auto-abortion is a disconcerting, if inspired, touch, and "There are men who will hunt me, / Hypnotize me with 'love', / So I will show less resistance to their / Life-stealing baby gun" has to be one of the least charitable rhymes on the subject of romance ever composed). The alternately elegant and possessed "Nothing" returns to this morbid subject ("We had a fetus once. / I squished it like a bug."), this time elaborating on Kristeen's disdain by weaving a detailed tapestry of the boy's side of the relationship ("Your discriminating mother says I'm like a daughter", "Your friends ... can't believe their eyes. / You're usually mummified, / With me you climb and dive and come alive"), only to shred it with the charging, repeated chorus "It means nothing to me". It's appallingly patronizing, I know, to cherish this decisive misanthropy because I don't believe it will last, but resolve this absolute is almost always woven from with the threads of its own unraveling. Maybe these songs are completely in earnest, and Kristeen Young will go to her grave believing that romance and children are cynical biological tricks, but I doubt it. Am I just imposing my own maturing weaknesses on her? Maybe. But she cares too much, about the things she cares about, for me to believe she lacks the compassion you have to lack to truly hate life this much. I insist on believing that on some level, perhaps not a conscious one (or not yet), these songs are trying to paper over doubts, which in the long run rarely works. "Fight, / With stones / And prayers / The enemy", goes the title-track's battle-cry. A real nihilist doesn't have enemies, because enemies imply that there are, or could be, friends. Be careful how you fight; sometimes the enemies, in fact, become the friends.

Trio II is not an album for worrying. The songs, as old as the Carter sisters' "Lover's Return" or as new as Harley Allen's "High Sierra", Jennifer Kimball and Tom Kimmel's "The Blue Train" and Randy Newman's misapostrophed "Feel's Like Home", nominally embody various emotions, but the point of this record is hearing Emmylou's ghostly sighs, Linda's silky lilt and Dolly's twang combine, as complementary a set of human voices as any I know, and listening to it all my anxiety seems splendidly misplaced. I should find a place to sit down, a porch or a hammock or a creek bank or something, and look around me. I should stop cataloging the questions I don't know the answers to and take a moment to breathe in the answers to all the questions I never need to ask. Forget about all the indie bands I've never heard, and the singers whose torments I can't alleviate, and the forgotten geniuses I can't rescue, and just listen to some of the world's best professional makers of beauty practicing their exquisite art. If these songs are so much calmer than my life, and yet so steeped in love and awe, what is it I think they lack that my usual thrashing is supposed to supply? I don't know. But there's a stack of CDs beside my keyboard that I haven't even listened to yet, so maybe one of them will tell me.