Lately, I've been thinking a lot about purpose. I think it's a pretty normal thing for a college student-for an Amherst College student-to do. We're here, after all, and we've been thrust into a place where we're not the only one anymore; where the things by which we defined ourselves in high school hardly matter because in any given room you walk into you find a varsity athlete, a valedictorian, a world-renowned polka dancer, a boy who can make the origami likeness of Boris Yeltsin in 10 seconds flat-you know, all of those great things that people live and die and wake up in the morning reflexively patting themselves on the back for that don't really mean a fucking thing when we say them out loud or write them on an application. I'm not saying that they don't mean anything in general; I just mean that I resent the fact that college and the world in general reduce experiences to words on a page, to titles, to yearbook superlatives. What I've decided about purpose is that it lies in the experience, and that whoever told you that form follows function was lying. I've got just the thing to prove it.

That thing is "#1," the debut record from the duo of Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner, a couple of crazykooky performance artists-cum-musicians. Taking cues from glorious and aimless synth pop, electronica and androgynous artisans, with hairstyles more angular than their cheekbones, who sprinkled themselves upon the '80s like sugary gems of fun and excess on an already strange ice cream cone, Fischerspooner have charged themselves with the task of picking up where seminal post-punk weirdos like David Byrne, Kraftwerk and all the other stock characters of the new wave invasion left off.

"#1" is a masterful soundscape of dots and loops and the pushing of buttons-an album that is just as much about the experience of sound as it is about music. One look at the colorful liner notes, which feature Fischer, Spooner and their veritable hamlet of insane counterparts adorned in elaborate costumes that would make even the most decorated drag queen jealous, will tell you that Fischerspooner and the minds behind it are fascinated by the presentation of their product, their performance ideal and the experience of what it is they've created and how it all came about. As for the music, well, the proof is in the pudding.

"#1" starts off with a peculiar little bang entitled "Sweetness," a track that sets the

tone quite well for the rest of the album. It is peppered with enough noise, pitch-shifting, mechanical poetry of engines and the near anthemic circuitry of discordant sound and staccato electronic gyrations to last you for the rest of your life, or at least until they put out a sophomore effort.

Somehow as pretentious as it is accessible, the opening tracks of "#1" waste no time in thrusting you into the experience that Fischer and Spooner have collectively engineered for your listening pleasure. On my favorite track of the album, "Emerge," Fischerspooner and their guest vocalists croon and squeak nebulous lyrics over a strange sonic background that will leave you wondering more than once if your CD is skipping (it's not-yes, they're that strange).

The album is consistently strong and strange throughout, moving from noisy tracks that bang proverbial pots and pans inside your inner ear to beautiful, starry-eyed songs that to rival the stormy emotions of a lovesick sailor. "Tone Poem" is one such song, a layered and quietly-looming melody that sounds as if Icelandic wunderkinds Sigur Rós had suddenly starting singing A) on key and B) in decipherable English. It's sad and it's gorgeous, and it will move you somewhere mere music doesn't take you, somewhere beyond a transcript of swiftly written summaries of action and deep into the experience and the story behind it. It will take you far past wherever function leaves you desperately grasping for more, and where form will, instead, deposit you in the midst of a soul-deep satisfaction in what you've just heard, what you've just experienced. When Fischerspooner sings ominously about something that "sounds good/looks good/feels good too," you can't help but think that they're talking about themselves-and that they're absofuckinglutely correct.