The music of The Original Cyndi, the quirky and very personal project of Memphian Justinedward, can be maddeningly difficult to get. Full of antiquated keyboard sounds and jarring syncopations, songs like "Get Along" and "Paralyzed By Fear and Doubt" are jerky and dissonant, conjuring up a bleak, paranoid world.

It's as if Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett, post crack-up, had been hired to write music for an Eastern European circus.

''If I'm going to go out, I want to see a show,'' says Original Cyndi's Justinedward (second from right), with bandmates J.D. Reager, Joey Pegram, Eric Wilson, Ryan Proctor and Jason Pulley.

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Further distancing can be The Original Cyndi's live shows in which Justinedward -- backed by his old school friend and longtime musical collaborator, J.D. Reager, and the members of his band, the Cold-Blooded Three -- dresses in drag and employs a dizzying array of fantastic props.

"He doesn't tell us what he's going to do in advance," says Reager. "He just shows up with a car full of inflatable balloons, an inflatable toilet and an oar."

But beneath the eccentric noise and the outlandish stage show, is a deeply intimate and well thought-out musical vision. Reaching beyond the usual rote recitation of love clichés, Justinedward's music, as captured on The Power Without the Price, a new, long incubating CD being released Saturday with a show at the Buccaneer, is as original a songwriting voice as you are likely to find.

The sessions that make up The Power Without the Price actually stretch back seven years, the languishing victims, Justinedward says, of his of his own laziness and slow songwriting. His musical ambition was also derailed during this time by marriage and a mind-numbing job in a customer call center, topics that also work their way in The Power Without the Price.

When Justinedward emerged from his divorce a few years ago, it was with a rededication to his music. He contacted Reager to help him finish his record, stitching together demos from seven years earlier with new recordings.

"I wasn't sure if they were going to fit together," Justinedward says. "I originally thought they'd be separate projects, but I'm not a prolific songwriter. It's taken me like seven years or eight years to come up with this much. So I was like, I'll collect the best of what I have ... and just put it under the Original Cyndi banner."

Born Justin Edward Jordan, Justinedward grew up in the Berclair neighborhood where he was raised by his deeply religious grandparents and attended the equally devout Harding Academy. Almost in spite of his strong spiritual grounding, however, from an early age he was fascinated by technology.

"I would go to Circuit City when I was like 8 years old and just hang out and stare at all these great stereos and TVs and PCs," says Justinedward, who titled his new CD as homage to the old Atari ST, one of the first computers outfitted with MIDI for use in musical settings.

Coming of age during the computer home-recording boom of the late '90s, Justinedward's interest in tech soon dovetailed into a music obsession. He would scour the music collection of the old Central Library to discover new sounds and quickly developed a fascination with '60s British psychedelia with its primitive electronic flourishes. Soon he was making his own home recordings and sharing them with classmates.

"I first met him in ninth grade," says his longtime musical partner Reager. "He was this crazy guy who made these tapes under the name Psychedelic Pedro. He would bring these tapes for me and my friends who were in bands. Eventually we were in a band together."

That first group was called Population 20, which eventually morphed into the electronic rock duo Johnny Romania. That group enjoyed short-lived popularity before breaking up when Reager and Justinedward went their separate ways to college.

Justinedward attended the University of Memphis where he studied recording and formed the first version of the Original Cyndi, a group modeled on his burgeoning interest in the glam rock of the early 1970s.

Slowly Justinedward began to forge his own esoteric take on glam, which he now calls "garage glam rock." He kept the music's psychosexual bent as pioneered by David Bowie but put his own twist on it. Originally the name of the band was a play on "original sin," but, inspired by a girlfriend who was painting a series of portraits of cross dressers, he fashioned a full-blown persona.

"It was just a great gimmick," he says of Cyndi. "It's definitely a show. I believe in a show. A lot of people play music. A lot of people are great. But if you're going to go see a band live you want to see something. If I really want to listen to music, I listen to an album. If I'm going to go out, I want to see a show. Like with a capital 'S'."

The Original Cyndi with the Warble and comedienne Mary Jordan

10 p.m. today at the Buccaneer, 1368 Monroe. Admission: $5. For more information, call 278-0909.