Seer, Portland duo Golden Retriever’s second release for Thrill Jockey, is an album deeply committed to defamiliarization.

A collection of five suite-length songs, Seer constantly throbs and quakes with new sounds that float in and out of the sonic field, seemingly from nowhere, as difficult to place as they are to define. Matt Carlson and Jonathan Sielaff seem to be captivated not only by the possibilities of their diffuse approach to electronic music – frequently scooping out any direct notion of rhythm in favor of long squalls and glacier-like chords – but also by the difficulty in naming what might even be producing its palette of lush, baroque sounds. One is never entirely sure if they’re hearing a corroded electric guitar or a particularly organic synthesizer, a rich woodwind or an oddly melodic swath of feedback.

Album-opener “Petrichor” exemplifies this studied lack of solid ground. The song begins with the brightened glitter-tones of a synthesizer at the top of its range before abruptly swooping down to an almost absolute bottom, a trench-like basso profondo that roils like a stomachache beneath the glimmer of keys. Swooning back and forth between wobbly atonal contrast and momentary glimpses of harmonic sympathy, the song is beautifully unsettling. At times “Petrichor” plays like a 45 of Rite of Spring played at 33 RPM, spooky and random. The canyon-like low notes are, like many sounds here, difficult to qualify, sounding at times like treated guitars, elsewhere like a cello or keyboard. The song’s floor eventually melts away, long before one could settle on its origins, leaving slow-bending versions of those same introductory keyboards to swirl in the newly opened space. The song’s last sounds are ambient bits of incidental noise.

An almost perversely cheery keyboard plinks down a few notes, and the fugue fades into “Sharp Stones,” which quickly sets about shaping those random sounds and piano sketches into a sonic bed over which rich woodwinds swoop in and out. Globs of synthesized bass plod the song’s margins as the jazz-like reed slowly corrodes, sinking into an uncanny arc of electrified noise beneath slowly accruing sheets of distortion. Before long, what was once clearly a woodwind could be mistaken for any number of other acid-pocked studio artifacts. Once again Golden Retriever resists solid ground; if “Sharp Stones” is, at least in its construction, more recognizable as a jazz-tinged piece of ambient electronica, the duo is nevertheless unwilling to cede much else. Soon the winds are stretched out like brightly-colored taffy, hanging above jots of gummy noise.

When the song quickly recedes into the bird calls and bell tones of “Archipelago” one gets the sense that they’re about to experience the same process all over again – the shell game by which natural sounds unspool into uncanny swoons. “Archipelago” begins with sonorous waves of harmony, woodwinds layering over the titter of birds and the subtle wash of white noise, only flirting with atonality as the notes mainly fold together, friendlier versions of what has come before. A bouncing ball of low-end synth eventually sets a striding pace, but for much of “Archipelago” things remain in a pleasant, major key interlude. Trickles of placeless computer noise eventually descend – at the very moment the woodwinds fade away – making room for deep swells of organs and strings to arc upward, recalling the operatic drama of “Petrichor,” but without that song’s undertone of dread.

That sonic scheme, by which more easily placed melodies and sounds are eventually papered over with increasingly unsettled noise, stands as the dominant mode for Seer. Indeed, “Archipelago” mainly surprises for just how long it remains in its original, bucolic romanticism before sinking beneath those familiar waves. In some ways, that recognizable movement is welcome, making up for other placeholders like rhythm (drums are essentially absent with the exception of some especially percussive low notes and synth jabs) and obvious melody by attaching each song’s value to its twilit transformations. Each number becomes a different kind of sunset.

“Flight Song” is perhaps the only track here that really resists that teleology. Beginning with sprinkles of fizzy, coiling synthesizers and smoothed-out bass clarinet, the song offers recognizable peaks and troughs, but they’re largely built around almost verse/chorus-like dynamics of addition and subtraction rather than the devolution of earlier tracks. The song occasionally blossoms into full flower with the addition of more and fuller keys, but “Flight Song” roughly ends where it begins, seemingly settled on near-gentle dulcet tones the way “Sharp Stones” and “Petrichor” were pitched toward ghostly chaos. It makes for the album’s most beautiful span, and offers partial reassurance that Golden Retriever can make their sonic patchworks in the form of something other than the midnight descent of the album’s opening half.

“Superposition,” the album’s closing track, and also its longest, begins by finding middle ground between the album’s extremes of complication and pleasance. Long ropes of bass clarinet hang between jittering electronic clicks, melodies weaving their way between abstract echoes, the organic blending with the synthetic. Arcing woodwind harmonies knife in and out at random (another Stravinsky echo), sometimes beautifully bright, elsewhere offering unsettling dissonance against the occasional rumbles of synthesized bass. Surprisingly (and indeed, the unexpectedness of the moment is likely why Golden Retriever chose it), percussion begins to fade in – first a tip-toe of hi-hat, then an almost imperceptible bass drum – giving the illusion of forward-motion to the freeform reeds and synthesizer arpeggios that surround it, like a snowstorm washing around a pair of fog lamps. The album ends with those bubbling keys and that dreamy notion of 4/4 simplicity, as if Golden Retriever doubted the sustainability of such clarity. Indeed, a glimpse at the album cover for Seer, a severe black circle surrounded by a chaos of stars and glimmers, betrays the album’s chief theme: moments of symmetry floating in space.