Lyricist Chris Mosdell has written for a host of famous acts, including Eric Clapton, Boy George, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yellow Magic Orchestra, has co-written with Michael Jackson and collaborated on film scores and theatrical productions. You may have heard some of his lyrics in Mobile Suit Gundam, a robot warrior animation film series.

Mosdell says the music he produces these days represents the music of "the new musician," which evolved from "the old musician that sat down and actually played some instruments." His most recent CD, Fingerprints of the Gods, took two years to organize, and was created for the gallery installations of Graham Hancock's best-selling book of the same name. He writes for two to three hours every morning by hand, but his main instrument is the computer; Mosdell uses a MIDI program and the occasional keyboard to work his musical magicÑsometimes using unusual tactics to strike the right chord.

"On the first track, there's this kind of mutated voice which is actually an Apache Indian reading the Bible," he said. "I was looking for an ancient voice, and I needed something that nobody was going to get."

The music on the album is full of samples and morphed sounds, all with a rhythm that takes you off the beaten mainstream path and onto a road of sound that seems to never clearly end or go in one direction.

"His theories are all about the wobble of the axis of the planet," Mosdell said of Hancock's book. "All these theories are connected with this whole numerical formula, and anything from Stonehenge to the pyramids are all astrological, astronomical readings of some sort which I've tried to incorporate in this record. We've made pyramid-shaped chordsÑchords that relate mathematically to the pyramids. I've used pi!"

Even the cover art is sampled; Graham Hancock's wife, Santha, took all the photos featured in the Osaka exhibitÑand Mosdell took the liberty of collaging them together for the cover of his album, mismatching elements and changing the colors.

Among his other accomplishments include the Gold Prize award at the Tokyo Music Festival for his lyrics, the Yuki Hayashi-Newkirk Poetry prize (and the Grand Prize for Poetry at the Boulder Festival of Literature in Colorado), a commission to write the election theme song for the Social Democratic Party of Japan, and judge of JAL's International Haiku Contest. Mosdell's lyrics have been published in "Ink Music: The Lyrics of Chris Mosdell," "Writing the Riot Act in the Illiterate Hour: New and Selected Lyrics," "LAA... The Dangerous Opera Begins," "The Erotic Odes" and "The Yelp House Kantos."

Though Mosdell is a lyricist, his personal CD player spews instrumental and electronica, not words. "I'm listening to a lot of electronic, ambient music. Aphex Twin, Chemical Brothers, Orbital, that kind of stuff," he said.

"Originally, lyrics had to be fit into a melody. With sampling... the music has sounds and cut up phrases that are just as interpretable as something with lyrics of any meaning; it just depends on how the individual interprets it. When music has a melody, you just listen," said Mosdell. "But when the music has atmosphere, you enter it. You walk around in it."

With Fingerprints of the Gods in hand, and Mosdell's music ringing in your ears, you can enter the realm of the new musician right alongside him.