Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth once described her position as a woman between two boys with guitars as like being in the center of a circle jerk. Yoshimi P-We, the Boredoms' minxy drummer, could probably relate. As the rhythm section for the Boredoms' musical onslaught, she is at ground zero between both Eye Yamataka's vocal hysteria and Seiichi Yamamoto's guitar histrionics.

So in OOIOO, her all-girl group, Yoshimi has shaped a distinctly female space. "Everything is different," she says. "From the smell in the air to the atmosphere. It's not that one [gender] is better than the other. [Men and women] are just two different kinds of animals."

Taking its cues from girl-group predecessors such as the Slits or the Raincoats, the first OOIOO album was a reworking of avant-garde new wave shot through with shiny moments of Yoshimi's saucy wit. It was a distinctly, yet off-kilter, pop album. The new album, "Green and Gold," keeps the challenging instrumentation but leaves behind the plastic, pop as Pop Art feel. Instead, the fierce otherworldliness of Alice Coltrane, the sprawling looseness of the Grateful Dead and the pointy pastoralism of "The Rites of Spring" have been rolled into one beguiling package.

Like a personal Shinto shrine, the album sings with a homespun reverence for nature. "I wasn't really conscious of it, but the forest became the starting point of the album," says Yoshimi.

She has described it as the aural equivalent of climbing a mountain, and though the album was not planned as a conceptual whole, it feels that way.

"It opens with a fanfare and then progresses to the second track just like walking along a mountain path," she explains. "On the third track, they suddenly confront the reality of the mountain. The fourth track is based on a melody by Seiichi Yamamoto [of the Boredoms] and is based on a literal translation of his family name.

"It's sort of like punk bands from the mountains, rolling out one after the other," she says in a characteristically oblique statement.

Perhaps this natural vibe was written in the stars. Yoshimi, born under the sign of the water carrier, Aquarius, has recently taken to tracking down spring water, lugging her 10-liter thermos on rural bus routes in search of the good stuff. This marked the beginning of her wanderlust.

Big bits of the album were inspired by a recent hiking trip in the northern mountains of Thailand near the Myanmarese border. While there, Yoshimi and her guide became lost and depended on the flight of a dragonfly to show them the way. That experience became the basis of the cut "Emerald Dragonfly."

"In certain Japanese mythology, the dragonfly is considered the master of fantasy," says Yoshimi.

Given the album's dreamy, otherworldly production, the dragonfly is a fitting familiar. Yoshimi's vocals are at turns lilting and incantatory, the music, transcendent and spacey. This spaciousness, a point that Yoshimi says only women tend to see, almost recalls dub.

"It may be because I paid a lot of attention to pulling out sounds and putting in spaces," she says, "though I did this instinctively, relying on my senses rather than any sort of prescribed idea.

"More than anything I tried to approach the mix with a gentleness of mind and heart. You might be able to hear it in the sound, there is a real contentment. I'm surprised at how solid and phat that sense of gentleness could be."

Given the Boredoms' sonic overload, this may come as a surprise, but though OOIOO may have the outline of a rock band, that isn't really the point.

"My first intention isn't to play rock," she says, "but to use the form and the instrumentation to create sounds that have never been heard before or that recall the sounds of nature, like the sounds of wind or air. A lot of ethnic instruments were created with the intention of making sounds like that.

"It's OK if people come to see OOIOO and say 'Yoshimi is really rocking out,' but to me what I'm doing is soul music."

OOIOO with Rovo, Soft, 4 p.m. Nov. 4 at Musashino University School Cultural Festival in Ekoda. For more information, call (03) 3310-7998.

Next weekend appears to be one of the best opportunities in recent memory for hearing the latest innovative bleeps and beats. London music mag The Wire kicks things off Thursday night with eclectic improvisation and electronica (see my previous column). As if that wasn't enough, the Germans will display their digital prowess Friday night with the first installation of "Electronicaccident."

These three evenings could almost qualify as Wire nights too. Many of the artists have been featured in the magazine, and to paraphrase its masthead, all should offer their own particular adventure in sound. Masami Akita, Japan's master noisemaker, looms over the event. He will be performing in both his seminal noise incarnation, Merzbow, and in tandem with Carsten Nicolai in Cyclo. Nicolai's own solo project, Noto, will also be featured. His experiments with the "found" sounds of information transmission -- faxes, dial tones and the like -- are a sort of auditory commentary on the information age.

But the biggest buzz belongs to Munich's Chicks on Speed. The Chicks' witty take on electronica probably comes from listening to too many B-52s and Flying Lizard records. They throw in kitschy German house and mildly provocative anti-politics (think of the Situationists) for good measure. In the grand old tradition of art students as rock stars, music is only one part of the Chicks' creative realm. Past projects have combined music, fashion, performance and film. Rumor has it that most of their live shows are prerecorded, but the performance will probably be more than just musical anyway.