No one evokes the electronic mysteries of the global village more seductively than Thomas Dolby. The twenty-five-year-old English singer/songwriter and electronic wizard is more than a technopop maestro using synthesizer and computer technology to be trendy and futuristic; he is a romantically inclined composer and lyricist working to fuse electronic and acoustic music into a genuinely modern pop-symphonic style.

Like such other contemporary rock artists as Sting and Laurie Anderson, Dolby deals more with the world as a whole than with the autobiographical investigations that inspired much of the best Seventies pop. The Flat Earth, his second album, is a kind of global travelogue. It begins somewhere this side of the Iron Curtain with "Dissidents," the paranoiac interior monologue of a political fugitive who worries about the value of the printed word against a syncopated din of typewriters. And it ends in a hard-funk urban madhouse ("Hyperactive!"), where Clockwork Orange droogs and dolls run wild.

The album's most beautiful cut, "Screen Kiss," offers a Hitchcockian dream sequence of movie-colony death in musical language as sumptuous as Bernard Herrmann's. Cocktail-piano music and jetliner sound effects ripple through a chiming guitar-and-bass arrangement that recalls the obsessional mood of Joni Mitchell's "Hejira." Equally atmospheric, "Mulu the Rain Forest" creates a jungle dreamscape with music that sounds like underwater harpsichords mingled with wooden pipes, animal sounds and mysterious tonal whooshes. Like Dolby's novelty hit "She Blinded Me with Science," "Hyperactive!" begins with a doctor placating a patient. But where the world of "She Blinded Me with Science" remained coolly zany, in "Hyperactive!" the lunatics (led by the sassy white-funk singer Adele Bertei) quickly take over the asylum, yelling against jazz flute and steel-drum-like embellishments.

Through these settings, Dolby's voice maintains a thread of continuity. He enthusiastically praises adventure and love, and in the title song, love becomes the answer to the world's banalities and terrors. "And if love is all you're missing/Look into your heart/Is anybody home?/The earth can be any shape you make it," Dolby declares in a liquid electronic environment that suggests Giorgio Moroder's sequenced synthesizer lines softened into an Enoesque pastel. Thomas Dolby clearly has the talent and the technical know-how to make music any shape he wants it. (RS 418)

STEPHEN HOLDEN