Under Tangled Silence

As it starts out, this feels like a very smooth record. Virtuosic piano playing and complex dance rhythm programming ebb and flow, all within a kind of rich, modernist sheen that feels like it’s flowed in a continuum from old ECM discs through latterday Four Tet tunes. It’s elegant and embracing, you might drift off into it. But as the record goes on disjunctions open up like cracks in reality, whether through grime-like rhythmic juddering, sudden bursts of Autechrean sound design, or just sudden melodic left turns. The whole album is a psychedelic roller-coaster where exquisitely-painted vistas will suddenly twist into industrial hellscapes, Claude Debussy gets sweaty down a UK garage rave, complex calculus becomes raw sorrow then gleaming euphoria. There is so much to unpick, you could spend a year playing it and still find more – and yet it holds together. A portal into a really remarkable mind.