You can't pick your family, the saying goes, but you can choose your friends. In particular your MySpace friends.Stephane Leonard has sorted his top MySpace friends so that his best buddies apparently include Leonardo Da Vinci, Robert Rauschenberg, Andrei Tarkovsky, James Joyce, Antonin Artaud and Jean-Michel Basquiat (plus Gray, Basquiat's band with Vincent Gallo). There's others as well, most of whom are equally dead – I'm guessing that Iannis Xenakis wasn't too worried about his internet profile when he was alive and wouldn't have spent his time adding names to his MySpace, so it seems that Leonard has befriended people who run semi-official fan pages for the deceased. This leads one to the conclusion that either Leonard doesn't have many real friends on MySpace or that he's being unbelievably pretentious. Given that Leonard lists nearly a dozen (living) collaborators on his website it seems a little odd that he would ignore them in favour of Sun Ra and Moondog. Nothing wrong with giving props to this selection of people, but it does give the impression that Leonard's a rather intense gentleman, given to carrying around a copy of Image-Music-Text in his back pocket for effect.

Certainly, on the surface, his album Lykkelig Dyr ("Happy Animals" in Norwegian) doesn't owe much to any of the aforementioned writers, filmmakers, artists and musicians, sounding much closer to the laptop-based work of Janek Schaefer, and any number of Max-MSP users (Leonard has apparently "self-coded" his software, according to his press release but that doesn't make it sound strikingly different). An artist and teacher as well as musician, Leonard has made a record of impressionistic sounds that float around in an amorphous haze before occasionally coalescing into a coherent pattern for a while before dispersing again. Overall, it has a very urban, industrial feel to it – not in the sense of a collaboration of Beyoncé and Nurse With Wound, but rather the sounds of factories, building sites, of the spaces between towerblocks and the despairing alienation of the buildings themselves.

What's refreshing to this reviewer's ears is that despite working in a crowded and increasingly homogenous genre, Leonard has made a rather effective work. There's a lot of music produced on laptops for a small audience and much of it lacks the scope of Lykkelig Dyr. It's difficult to say exactly what makes the difference – it's like trying to compare contemporary abstract art or maybe why one mountain is better than another. At first, I was put off by the MySpace friends which meant I didn't want to like this album (shallow and prejudiced, yes, but on such minor details are affections often won and lost). I was expecting – nay, hoping – to find it a badly constructed, ill-conceived piece peddling the same sounds and ideas I've heard before. Instead, I discover an album that is, on the one hand, low-key and understated and on the other full of sensory triggers that paint pictures in the mind. Stephane Leonard may be quite handy with a brush but he's also proving to be a real artist with sound.

-Jeremy Bye