Oneohtrix Point Never / Rene Hell – Music For Reliquary House / In 1980 I Was A Blue Square

OPN's Music For Reliquary House finds Dan Lopatin revisiting the experimental modes of 2011's Replica but toning down that album's sense of rhythm and melody in favour of a more rigorous focus on extracting alien DNA from human speech patterns. In parts sounding like Farmers Manual jamming with Anne-James Chaton, Lopatin's mishmash of stuttering electronics, spacey drones and hyper-edited chunks of spoken text exude a calming, meditative quality at odds with its chaotic structure; an unexpectedly soothing, though not particularly adventurous, excursion into the realm of glitch.

Rene Hell's side (entitled In 1980 I Was A Blue Square) features strangled electronic jams and drones laid atop a series of classical figures for piano and strings. It is, by turns, jarringly discordant and disappointingly polite, often coming across like a less elegantly realised take on Keith Fullerton Whitman's Variations for Oud and Synthesizer. Its heavy-handed play of contrasts nevertheless makes for a strangely compelling listen.