The pop-music landscape sometimes to me resembles coarse fabric — fabric with lots of weight and substance, which distracts you from the fact of all the holes in between: “holes” as in “opportunities,” for artists with just the right sort of corkscrew sensibilities. Jherek Bischoff is one of those odd-duck musicians who periodically poke through the surface.

Unlike most singers and songwriters, Bischoff seems to work in no particular niche. For his 2012 album, Composed (also released in a straight instrumental version, called Scores), Bischoff composed all the songs on a ukelele, with the idea that they’d eventually be performed by an orchestra. Then (in his own words):

This record was recorded with one microphone, an Mbox and a laptop. I recorded each individual musician of the “orchestra” in their very own living rooms. I then layered each instrument (sometimes one violinist playing one part twenty times for instance) until it was the size of a huge orchestra. I spent the summer bike riding from house to house recording each musician. I then took a road trip and recorded all of the singers except Caetano and David.

(“Caetano” there is Caetano Veloso, a Brazilian multi-genre performer, composer, and activist; Wikipedia describes his genre as a blend of Música Popular Brasileira, tropicália, psychedelic rock, folk rock, and bossa nova. “David,” of course, is David Byrne.)

I have no idea if Bischoff is exaggerating the makeshift elements in this description of the album. (And when he says he went “bike riding,” I sort of hope he meant via motorcycle.) However he did it, this song is a gorgeous, many-layered thing. Bischoff’s site includes some photographs shot during the video’s recording, among them what seems to be a set of choreographic instructions for Byrne’s on-camera contribution:

(In some respects, you might regard this as a catalogue of Byrne’s standard on-camera repertoire. It does not, however, seem to correspond to the actual sequence of movements in the video.)

And here’s the video itself:

[Lyrics — as you can see, there’s some uncertainty about a portion of them; this is how numerous lyrics sites handle the matter. If I ever get any other interpretation, I’ll update the lyrics here.]