Miranda July is a kind of
performance artist who has made her name with her bizarre, extremely creepy
spoken word albums released on the Kill Rock Stars label.
Her two full length albums, "Ten Million Hours a Mile", and "The Binet-Simon Test", feature long spoken word tracks with minimal musical accompaniment, and showcase her fluttery, breathy voice and her trademark of switching among different characters without switching her voice, creating confusion and a feeling of unease.
"The Binet-Simon Test" is ultimately more accessible than "Ten Million Hours a Mile" (if one could call a Miranda July album "accessible"). The former features a strange stories about:
Medical experimentation with chemical weapons ("Medical Wonder")
A group of three kids on a talk show claiming they can't feel pain ("Lena Beamish")
Some kind of cryptic exchange between a woman and a character who can only communicate with claps and a buzzer ("I Can - Japan")
A piece involving characters calling into a radio show ("WSNO")
And, a piece that's too complex to describe in words ("The Co-Star").