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It takes a while, but Alaska in Winter eventually warms up.

The band, that is. Which means Brendon Bethancourt, who is Alaska in Winter like Trent Reznor is Nine Inch Nails. And not "warm up" as in tune the instruments and find a groove. More like warm to the idea of a conversation with a stranger who is curious about him and his music.

This is a 25-year-old University of New Mexico music grad who prefers to sing through a vocoder, a device related to the synthesizer that warps the voice. A metaphor for his approach to identity and message? No, just a cool device Bethancourt experimented with.

"I just wanted to try it and it stuck," he said.

Bethancourt, a keyboardist, is carving out a niche in the electronic wing of the Balkan/Gypsy music movement led by his occasional bandmates Zach Condon of Beirut and Heather Trost of A Hawk and a Hacksaw. Condon contributes melancholy ukelele and lead vocals ("So, here we are, standing alone") on "Close Your Eyes," one of the standout tracks on Alaska in Winter's latest disc, "Dance Party in the Balkans."

Bethancourt's music has been described as icy and detached at times.

Perhaps he's still working through the experience that inspired this latest musical incarnation - the months he spent, three years ago, holed up in Alaska. The winter darkness was a sharp contrast to the New Mexico sun.

"I kind of liked it," Bethancourt said. "It's totally different than anything I was used to."

But it wasn't just the Alaskan sky that was unremittingly dark.

"I had a lot of time to think, to think a lot," Bethancourt said. "I thought so much about my life and everyone else that it started to drive me nuts. And reading Dostoyevsky didn't help much. I got really depressed, I guess."

Things didn't improve when he returned to his sunny home state.

"I came back to New Mexico and had a really bad year after that, mostly with relationships," he said. "It was a really bad time following Alaska. . . . Since then, things have been going better."

Well, except for this past May, when he returned to Albuquerque from a trip to New York to find that his place was broken into and a bunch of his electronic equipment was stolen - two laptops, a hard drive and a video camera. He lost the original mixes of most of his songs.

Lucky for him, before that trip he had sent a set of masters for his album to his label in England. But there was other stuff he'll never get back, like some unreleased Beirut material, he said.

"It sounds weird, but those computers were everything to me."

But soon, he gained a little perspective.

"It's a good reminder to see how silly things can get," Bethancourt said. "I mean, this little silver box was everything to me. When it was gone, I felt like my life was over."

And then he left New Mexico again. In late summer and early fall he embarked on his first tour. He had never played outside of the state before his tour that took him to New York, Toronto, Chicago and Los Angeles.

He was, naturally, worried about setting out and hitting bigger concert halls.

"The biggest venue I was used to was the Launchpad," he said. But his fears quickly went away. "It seemed easier to be playing in front of a thousand people than 20 or 30 people."

He also says he has essentially outgrown an Albuquerque music scene that holds no allure for him.

"I've seen what's out there, and I've been spoiled," he said, "and I don't want to play here anymore."

He cites lousy pay and unaccommodating venues that, he says, treat artists like second-class citizens.

"Now that I'm on tour, I understand why people skip New Mexico," he says.

But the tour wasn't all bright lights and big cities. There's that dark side again - the music industry.

"The more I get involved in this the more I think it's a bad idea," he said. "People aren't buying music."

Plus the licensing and other legal hassles reveal the challenges of trying to make a living as a creative artist.

He watches a buzz build behind Beirut and sees the business putting a strain on his pal.

"I got to see the other side to it, besides the glamour and the hype of making it big," Bethancourt said. "I see the downsides."

He seems like he's thought about this, thought about it a lot.

"I came back from the tour thinking that if I had gone into law school I'd be better off than if I'd gone to music school."

Bethancourt said he is poised to sign with a domestic label, Milan Records, in Los Angeles, to distribute "Dance Party in the Balkans" in North America. His main label is Regular Beat out of Liverpool, England, which found him on MySpace.com.

Having a label, he said, saved him from having to make CDs and send them out to the people who would e-mail him each week through his MySpace page. He expects his first royalty check this month.

And then he plans to leave New Mexico again. This time, perhaps, for good.

He said Regular Beat is trying to put together a European tour in April.

And then, Bethancourt says, he plans to move to East Berlin.

"My music will be better there," he said.

He says there's nothing for him in the United States.

"The culture is dying," he said. "It's really stagnant. There's not much happening here that I'm interested in.

"The people in Europe are really open to my music or to more experimental arenas in music. People don't freak out that I'm mixing all these different styles of music."