Immediately, we were wooed by Cryptacize's debut, last year, Dig That Treasure, and just as we thought that the Oakland band was fantastic, we hear the new material that they're currently recording for a follow-up and we're speechless. The songs - now primarily sung by Nedelle Torrisi - have taken on a different dimension or two in their maturity and in their creativity. They are a huge step forward and you'll be able to hear four of them in a few weeks when the group's debut Daytrotter Session posts here. It seems so ironic and coincidental that band member Chris Cohen contributes here a reading that explores a world that English schoolmaster Edwin A. Abbott created back in the late 1800s. It's amazing and fantastic that things like shapes and numbers and realities are still such fascinating things to think let your mind get blown apart by, even now in a day and age of Wiis and other colossal distractions. Simple sights, sounds and figures are still what explode our senses more than anything and it applies to music just as much as anything - these instruments that have existed forever can still be played in different ways and combinations to make intriguing compositions. Cohen does a great job of keeping us in the know while reading the foreword to Abbott's Flatland, cueing us when we're being talked about ("The readers in Spaceland...that's us...") and informing us that the stranger in the prose is the sphere. When the fourth, fifth and sixth dimensions are talked about, perhaps it's the next line that provided inspiration for some of the new Cryptacize material - those dreaming of making those dimensions possible are "thereby contributing to the enlargement of the imagination" - or maybe it's just a book.