It's a friendly collaboration that turned out to be a match made in limbo. Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous and Gnarls Barkley's Danger Mouse wrote a set of comely, haunted songs for alt-rock heavies (Black Francis, Julian Casablancas, James Mercer, Wayne Coyne, Iggy Pop) to be sold with a coffee-table book of darkly ironic photos by director David Lynch (who also lent his keep-your-day-job warble to two songs). But EMI inexplicably shelved the album. In response, the Horse and the Mouse came up with a sneakily Borgesian stunt, commodifying their music's very absence by selling blank CD-Rs online, with Lynch's book.

Night is all over the Internet, and that's a good thing: It's engrossing and organic in a way other all-star drive-by projects rarely are. Linkous' slow, soft, mossy folk-pop tunes and Danger Mouse's crackling atmospherics are perfect for sad-guy singers like Mercer, Casablancas, Jason Lytle and Gruff Rhys. (They'd also sound cool in one of those scenes from a Lynch movie where a guy with a head wound no one else can see wanders down a California highway that probably doesn't exist.)

Iggy Pop and Francis ride punkier animals that would be more at home in a different zoo. Still, the best stuff feels of a piece, especially "The Man Who Played God," a song about making your derangement work for you (sung delicately by Suzanne Vega), and "Daddy's Gone," on which Linkous and the Cardigans' Nina Persson explore the sweet, scary freedom that comes with being totally abandoned.