Who: Super-quirky twenty-four-year-old Cleveland native Joe Williams, who records experimental electronic music under the alias White Williams, and has toured extensively with his friend and fellow pastiche-aficionado Gregg Gillis a.k.a. Girl Talk.

Sounds Like: Williams takes a mad-scientist approach to his debut album Smoke, chopping, looping and reshuffling samples (sometimes randomly) of P-Funk bass lines and vintage drum clips. The result is an engrossing, dancey, atmospheric patchwork that takes cues from T. Rex, David Bowie and Brian Eno.

Three Things You Should Know:

1. The cover of Smoke — which features a transexual model sucking a hookah hose while crying — was, well, based on a true story. "There was this girl smoking weed while bawling about a guy," he recalls of the party tale that inspired the shot. "Being sad and wanting to be high is so weird, and I tried to re-create that weirdness."

1. Williams' lyrics are unsurprisingly deliberately cryptic. "A song could be about sex, or robbery, or it could be from an animal's point of view," he says. "It's never 'I want to write about my wicked stepmother.' " (For the record, he doesn't have one.)

2. More celebrities pay attention to Williams in his way-out-there-musician guise than did when he was a graphic designer or the drummer for a noise-metal band. "The little man from Twin Peaks [actor Michael J. Anderson] was at my L.A. show!" he says. "And he had a posse!"

Get It: Smoke came out November 6th on Tigerbeat6, and music is available on White Williams' MySpace. Click above to check out Williams in action at a New York show, plus an additional video interview where he tells the story of a random night out with Kelis and Pharrell.

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