CD: Oberman Knocks - Beatcroff Slabs

Sometimes a record tells you whether you're going to like it before you've even hit play. With electronica this goes double: track titles like "Scanlon's Leaping Gore Pull", "Pneuquonsis on Return" and "Fewton Tension Chords" are either going to intrigue a potential listener, or make you think "stop playing silly buggers".

If the former, then this collection is for you; if the latter, then there's not one nanosecond in the collection of grinding, bending, warping electronic sounds that is going to make you think otherwise.

Though there is some repetition to these grooves, there is nothing that resembles dance music as such. Rather, these are sounds pulled this way and that, thumped against one another, stretched out to reveal their fine details, and turned inside out purely for the sake of it. You may hear moments that sound like references to science fiction soundtracks, to the industrial music of the 1980s, to electroacoustic experimentation, even (as on "Jamcole Partition") to what sounds like Phil Collins - but these are always fleeting: this isn't modernist experimentation or postmodernist pastiche, it's just a set of sounds for its own sake.

There is plenty of sophistication, though. Every tone, every beat, is richly textured, even if those textures are uncomfortable to apprehend. The rhythms, inhuman and pseudo-random though they may be, are intriguing. It's like machine glossolallia, a resemblance of meaning that drags you in and endlessly frustrates. But you knew that, right? You've read this far, the track titles didn't put you off, so however ugly Beatcroff Slabs is, you may very well enjoy it.