Nadja Stoller’s new album, Earthbound, is a journey through the night. It carries you over open fields and through dense undergrowth to an inescapable place of introspection. What is grounded takes flight into dizzying heights; what is light can feel heavy; delicacy sits beside a distorted roughness. The music is at once grand and beautiful — disconcerting and painful — leaving you with the sense that nothing will ever be the same. The solo artist Nadja Stoller seeks out discomfort, difficulty and challenge. After a hedonistic Parisian phase that produced the album Alchemy (2011), she withdrew in the winter of 2012 to a place far from human habitation — a spot that might as well have been a volcanic desert in Iceland, the wide prairies of Alabama, or a derelict backwater in the French Alps. In that hermit-like seclusion she encountered all manner of creatures; above all, however, she confronted her own depths and heights and, ultimately, the eternal questions of human existence. Stoller let the words she gathered there mature for two years, gradually assembling them with fragments of banjo, piano, keytar and autoharp, before recording the songs with Samuel Baur in his studio in Bern. The result is a collection of ten fragile, sonically diverse songs that trace an arc from the bittersweet “A Heart,” through the unfathomable “Vertigo,” to the flirtatious “Strawberry Passion.” On stage these unconventional odes are amplified by Stoller’s presence — at once elfin and Amazonian. She layers sounds on a looper before the audience and, a minute later, brings everything crashing together. The effect is magical and surreal, yet also down-to-earth and organic. You are left with the impression that, not far from Stoller’s isolated cabin, you might just cross paths with a Björk, an Emmylou Harris or a Camille.