The problem with Mr.Vast is that he makes it extremely difficult to behave like a respectable music reviewer.

One can begin with genre. There is electronic music here, certainly. There are rave rhythms, drum'n'bass, acid-adjacent twitching, synth-pop, ambient passages, folk gestures, spoken word and things that appear to have wandered in from a children's television programme being broadcast from a parallel universe. One can mention absurdism, English eccentricity, cabaret, music hall, post-punk, techno and Wevie Stonder. All of these descriptions are technically defensible. None of them survives contact with the album for very long.

"Upping The Ante" is the third solo album by Henry Sargeant's Mr.Vast persona, following "Grievous Bodily Charm" and "Touch & Go". Sargeant's background as an actor and “dark clown”, together with his long-standing role as vocalist and frontman of Wevie Stonder, goes some way towards explaining why his relationship with the conventional idea of a song remains so cheerfully dysfunctional. Working with Al Boorman, who provides the music, production and mixing, Sargeant treats the pop song less as a fixed structure than as a piece of furniture that can be dismantled and rebuilt while somebody is still sitting on it. The remarkable thing is that "Upping The Ante" is not actually as chaotic as it first appears.

Its opening, “What's Difficult About Being Stupid?”, lasts twenty-eight seconds and immediately establishes that conventional introductions are not going to survive the afternoon. “Scatterbrain” follows with a miniature burst of warped, pseudo-medieval absurdity before “This And That” suddenly launches into a dance track that could, under different circumstances and with substantially less personality, have been mistaken for an actual club record. This is where Mr.Vast becomes particularly cunning.

The music is often genuinely catchy. That fact is easy to overlook because Sargeant fills it with linguistic detours, character voices, surreal observations and the general sensation that somebody has misplaced the instruction manual for human behaviour. Yet Boorman's productions are carefully constructed. Rhythmic transitions, synth figures, bass movements and abrupt changes of atmosphere are not random interruptions. They provide a stable framework against which the verbal nonsense can ricochet.

The absurdity works because the music underneath it works. “This And That” is perhaps the clearest example. It begins with enough dancefloor propulsion to make the listener suspect that Mr.Vast has finally agreed to behave, before the arrangement starts expanding into rave melodrama and rhythmic excess. The track becomes a kind of damaged celebration, simultaneously inviting the body to move and the brain to question why it is doing so.

This tension between genuine musical pleasure and comic disruption runs throughout the album.

“The Bench” takes a gentler route. Its softer electronic setting gives Sargeant room to occupy a more conversational space, creating the impression of a strange little monologue that has accidentally acquired accompaniment. It is almost conventional, which in the Mr.Vast universe means that something is probably about to go wrong.

“Neural Preening” supplies the expected malfunction. Nervous electronic figures, clipped rhythms and an animated vocal performance create a miniature nervous system operating at slightly too high a voltage. The influence of early electronic pop is audible without becoming imitation. There is something of the mechanical twitch of early-80s synth music, but the track is too self-aware to settle comfortably into retro territory.

That is important because "Upping The Ante" is not really interested in nostalgia.

It borrows historical materials the way a magpie steals shiny objects: because they look useful, not because it wishes to preserve them. A rave rhythm from one decade, a folk cadence from another, a lounge-piano gesture, a synth-pop texture, a documentary-music cliché: everything becomes available.

Then “Ants” arrives and demonstrates just how far the album can travel while apparently remaining in the same room.

A wandering vocal narrative is placed over a more relaxed musical setting, producing something halfway between a pub conversation, a spoken-word performance and a song that has forgotten what its chorus was supposed to be. The deliberately skewed imagery is funny, but the real pleasure comes from the way Sargeant's delivery keeps shifting the listener's understanding of what is happening. Is he telling a story? Performing a character? Improvising? Making fun of storytelling itself? Probably all four.

And this is where the connection to his theatrical background becomes more significant than the word “comedy” might suggest. Mr.Vast is not simply a musician who tells jokes between tracks. The voice is a dramatic instrument. Characters appear through changes of diction, accent, rhythm and attitude. The songs behave almost like miniature scenes in which the protagonist is never quite stable.
The album consequently has more in common with theatre than a superficial listen might suggest.

But it is theatre that has been fed through a malfunctioning jukebox.

“I Can't Help It” moves back toward rave and drum'n'bass territory, but the energy is constantly interrupted by vocal and narrative diversions. “Guess Who” provides one of the album's most convincing moments of relative simplicity, allowing the songwriting itself to emerge more clearly. It is a useful reminder that Sargeant and Boorman could presumably make something much more conventional if they were ever seized by an unfortunate lapse in judgement.

They simply don't seem interested. “Crumpet Man” is perhaps the record's great absurdist centrepiece. The music gradually adopts the proportions of an overly serious documentary soundtrack while the subject matter heads in a considerably less respectable direction. The contrast is exquisite. Grand electronic gestures promise historical significance; the vocal supplies something much closer to breakfast.

This is a recurring trick throughout the album: inflate something ridiculous until it becomes strangely majestic. It works because Boorman takes the musical arrangements seriously even when Sargeant refuses to take the subject matter seriously. The result is not novelty music in the disposable sense. The jokes have structural consequences. The music changes around them, accommodates them, contradicts them and occasionally makes them funnier by treating them with complete solemnity.

That solemnity is essential. If the production were merely goofy, the album would become exhausting very quickly. Instead, Boorman gives these songs enough musical weight to survive repeated listening. There are genuine textures, effective hooks, carefully chosen timbres and convincing rhythmic constructions underneath the nonsense. The humour is therefore sitting on top of actual composition rather than being used to conceal its absence.

The title track, “Upping The Ante”, pushes this approach into a kind of mock-anthemic territory. There is a sense of escalation, but also a recognition that escalation itself has become absurd. The album keeps raising its own stakes without ever explaining what game we are playing.

By the time “The End” arrives, the joke is almost philosophical.

Almost.

The record has spent forty-something minutes refusing to settle into a stable identity, and now it reaches a track called “The End”. Even that promise is treated with suspicion. Of course the ending is not quite an ending. With Mr.Vast, closure would probably require a permit.
What makes "Upping The Ante" more than a collection of eccentric sketches is its attitude toward sincerity.

Sargeant's performance is funny, but there is something vulnerable underneath it. The characters, voices and absurd situations are not simply exercises in distancing himself from the audience. They create a way of communicating that bypasses the embarrassment normally attached to direct emotional expression. He can be ridiculous without becoming emotionally empty.

That distinction matters.

There is a long tradition of British eccentricity in which silliness becomes a method for examining social behaviour. Mr.Vast belongs to that lineage, but "Upping The Ante" updates it through electronic music and rave culture. The music is not simply a soundtrack for eccentricity. It provides the contemporary machinery through which the eccentricity moves.

The result is a strange portrait of England assembled from fragments: pub speech, rave culture, music-hall exaggeration, absurd bureaucracy, overheard conversations, old-fashioned characters, contemporary electronic production and the peculiar national ability to discuss complete nonsense as though it were a matter of urgent public policy.

The record's apparent randomness is therefore deceptive. Its subject is actually quite coherent: the instability of identity and language in a culture saturated with performance.

Everyone is playing a role.

Mr.Vast simply refuses to hide the costume.

That refusal gives "Upping The Ante" an oddly liberating quality. The album does not ask the listener to admire its cleverness. It asks them to participate in the confusion. You can dance to it, laugh at it, wonder whether you have misunderstood it, or occasionally discover that a supposedly ridiculous passage has lodged itself in your head with alarming permanence.

The danger is that the sheer density of ideas can occasionally become exhausting. There are moments when Sargeant's verbal energy competes with Boorman's production rather than complementing it, and some of the jokes are sufficiently committed to their own absurdity that they risk wearing out their welcome.

But even that excess is part of the record's character.

"Upping The Ante" does not believe that restraint is automatically a virtue. It would rather throw another idea into the room and see what happens.

In that sense, Mr.Vast's third album is surprisingly serious about being unserious.

It understands that humour can be a form of musical structure, that nonsense can expose things literal language conceals, and that a dance track can be both ridiculous and genuinely exhilarating. Beneath the costumes and comic voices, there is an unusually precise collaboration between Sargeant and Boorman: one supplying a restless stream of language and persona, the other constructing musical environments capable of absorbing almost anything thrown at them.

So perhaps the most useful way to approach "Upping The Ante" is not to ask what genre it belongs to.

Ask instead what happens when somebody stops respecting the borders between genres long enough to discover that they were mostly imaginary anyway.

The answer is eleven tracks of warped pop, rave, theatre, nonsense, melody and electronic mischief.

It is funny.

It is occasionally beautiful.

It is frequently ridiculous.

And, rather inconveniently for anyone hoping to dismiss it as a joke, it is very well made.

Some music is made because somebody has a deadline. Some is made because somebody has a record contract. And occasionally, apparently, somebody makes five electronic improvisations to help a group of art students weave tapestries, only to discover that the weavers would rather listen to Radio 1. Thirty-nine years later, the tapes have escaped.

"Soundtracks For Weaving" is one of those releases whose backstory is almost too charmingly modest for the music it contains. Recorded by Ian Williams in Edinburgh in 1986 as an improvised accompaniment for friends studying tapestry at the city's art college, these five pieces were never really intended to become an album. They were practical music, or at least music aspiring to practical usefulness. The practical part failed. The music survived.

Williams has now recovered the original four-track cassette masters, digitised them and carefully reconstructed the recordings without adding contemporary production. The result is therefore not a modern musician attempting to recreate an imaginary 1986, but something much more valuable: 1986 itself, cleaned up just enough to let it breathe.

The equipment tells much of the story. A Roland SH-101 supplies the synthesizers, a Roland TR-707 handles the programmed percussion, and guitar appears here and there, with basic digital delay helping the elements occupy their slightly blurred, suspended spaces. There is nothing extravagant about the ingredients. The remarkable thing is what Williams manages to suggest with them.

The opening “The Vase” immediately reveals an artist already fascinated by the meeting point between melody and atmosphere. Its sequenced elements do not insist on becoming a conventional electronic composition. Instead, they seem to hover between soundtrack, song fragment and private experiment. This is particularly appropriate given that the piece eventually became the backing track for a Beautiful Pea Green Boat song, first appearing on Third Mind's "Future Tense" compilation in 1986 before being reworked for the band's "Get Religion".

That connection is useful because Beautiful Pea Green Boat was an important part of Williams' early trajectory. Founded in Edinburgh in the mid-1980s, the group combined electronic textures, ethereal vocals and melodic material in ways that anticipated some of the later dream-pop vocabulary. Their recordings occupied an appealingly ambiguous territory between synth music, gothic melancholy and something much softer and stranger. Contemporary retrospectives still struggle to put a clean label on them, which is probably a sign that the band was doing something right.

But "Soundtracks For Weaving" is less concerned with songs than with duration. “The Wee Red” and “The Horse” stretch patiently across ten and thirteen minutes, respectively, allowing Williams' primitive electronic machinery to reveal its character through repetition. The programmed drums are unmistakably products of their period, but their mechanical regularity gives the softer synthesizer tones something to push against. Rather than sounding dated in the pejorative sense, the technology becomes part of the emotional identity of the music. There is something wonderfully honest about that. The SH-101 does not pretend to be an orchestra. The TR-707 does not pretend to be a human drummer. The four-track does not pretend to be a pristine digital workstation. Everything sounds like what it is, and precisely because of that, the recordings develop an unusual warmth. Their limitations become compositional parameters.

“The Horse” is perhaps the clearest example. Its long-form development allows Williams to explore the tension between programmed rhythm and slowly shifting harmonic material without needing to manufacture a climax. The piece seems to move by accumulation rather than destination. A pattern settles into place, another element appears, the texture changes almost imperceptibly, and suddenly several minutes have disappeared.

This is music that understands that a loop does not have to be a prison. It can be a room. And perhaps the weaving connection is less accidental than it initially seems. Tapestry is fundamentally an art of repetition, incremental variation and accumulated detail. A thread passes through a structure again and again, apparently doing the same thing, until enough repetitions have occurred for an image to emerge. Williams' electronic constructions operate according to a surprisingly similar principle. Small sonic units recur, overlap and gradually acquire meaning through their relationships.

The students may have ignored the soundtrack, but the soundtrack was quietly learning from the activity around it. “The Etruscans” introduces a slightly more enigmatic character. The title alone suggests archaeology, fragments and buried histories, and the music has an appropriately distant quality. Williams does not attempt literal antiquity, of course. Instead, the piece creates the sensation of something half-remembered, with synthetic tones and programmed movement occupying a space that feels strangely detached from its technological origins.

Then comes “Flight”, the shortest piece at just over four minutes, and its brevity changes the perspective of the entire record. After the patient development of the preceding works, this final miniature feels almost like a departure scene. The album does not resolve so much as lift away. That lack of conventional resolution is one reason the record remains compelling as a contemporary listen.

It would be easy to treat "Soundtracks For Weaving" as an archaeological curiosity: here are some Roland instruments, here is a cassette from 1986, here is a forgotten branch of the electronic family tree. But that would undersell it considerably. Archival music becomes interesting when it stops behaving like evidence and starts behaving like music. These pieces do. They also reveal an early version of qualities that would become increasingly prominent in Williams' later work. His subsequent solo releases have moved through dark electronic compositions, cinematic soundtracks and minimalist ambient music, while his work for contemporary dance and documentary film has further developed his instinct for atmosphere and visual suggestion. His 2021 "All Becomes Desert", for example, returned to older analogue improvisations and used gradual change to evoke vast, inhospitable spaces. The connection is striking. Even when the scale changes, Williams seems drawn to music that creates environments without needing to describe them.

"Soundtracks For Weaving" is therefore an early document of a sensibility rather than merely an early document of technology. There is also an appealing absence of ambition here. These recordings were not apparently conceived as statements about electronic music, nor as attempts to predict the future. They were made for a practical purpose that nobody actually used them for. Williams kept the cassette because he liked what he heard. Decades later, he returned to it, repaired the technical problems and resisted the temptation to make it more contemporary. That decision matters. There is always a peculiar danger in revisiting old recordings with modern technology. Restoration can easily become revision. A musician can polish away the very imperfections that made the original material distinctive. Williams instead seems to have treated the old four-track like an archaeological object that deserved cleaning but not reconstruction according to present-day standards.

The music still sounds like 1986. It simply sounds like 1986 without a layer of dust over the speakers. And that gives the album an unexpected emotional quality. There is nostalgia here, certainly, but it is not the aggressively curated nostalgia of synthwave or retro culture. There are no neon signs, no artificial VHS haze, no desperate attempts to convince us that the past was cooler than the present. These recordings belong to their time because they were actually made then.

That distinction makes them strangely moving. The synthesizers have no idea that they will one day become historical objects. The drum machine has no idea that people will eventually find its sound charming. The guitarist certainly did not know that somebody would be listening to these tracks nearly forty years later while contemplating the absurd fate of music intended to accompany tapestry.

That is perhaps the quiet beauty of the record. We often imagine music history as a procession of major works, influential scenes and important names. In reality, there are countless little experiments happening in bedrooms, studios, art schools and borrowed rooms, most of which disappear. "Soundtracks For Weaving" is one of the fortunate survivors. Its original purpose has vanished, its context has changed, and its intended audience never showed up. Yet the music remains. The tapestries were never woven to it. That is almost beside the point now. Williams' five pieces have acquired their own pattern, one made not from wool and coloured thread but from analogue oscillators, primitive drum programming, delay, repetition and time. Nearly forty years later, they have finally found a listener.

Perhaps the weavers were wrong. Or perhaps they were simply listening to Radio 1 while Williams was quietly making something they would need much longer to catch up with.

Nostalgia is a dangerous ingredient.

Use too much of it and music becomes a museum, lovingly dusted but lifeless. Use just enough, however, and memory ceases to be about the past and instead becomes another instrument, capable of playing melodies that never quite existed. Espen Reinertsen understands this distinction remarkably well. "Venus er i håret" is soaked in familiar sounds, yet never settles for mere recollection. It is an album that remembers rather than recreates.

Nearly a decade after "Nattsyntese", the Norwegian composer, saxophonist, vocalist and producer returns to Susanna Wallumrød's SusannaSonata label with a record that quietly expands his already distinctive musical language. Reinertsen has long occupied an unusual position within Norway's adventurous music scene. As a collaborator he has appeared alongside artists as diverse as Jenny Hval, Jennifer Walshe, Toshimaru Nakamura, Christian Wallumrød and many others, moving comfortably between contemporary composition, free improvisation and experimental jazz. His solo work, however, has always followed its own peculiar orbit, one where pop songs behave like dreams and electronic textures seem to possess emotional memory.

Describing "Venus er i håret" simply as avant-pop feels accurate but incomplete.

Its five extended compositions certainly contain songs. They have verses, recurring melodies and lyrics delivered with quiet intimacy. Yet each one gradually mutates into something less predictable. Reinertsen has spoken of his affection for traditional songs that unexpectedly transform into long instrumental passages, "like an animal with different head and body". That image perfectly captures the album's architecture. Familiar forms gently dissolve into drifting instrumental landscapes before quietly finding their way home again.
One immediately notices the electronics.

The press material references vintage gaming consoles, and indeed the synthesizers frequently evoke early home computers and 8-bit sound chips. Fortunately, this never descends into fashionable retro aesthetics. These electronic voices do not exist to remind listeners of childhood afternoons spent staring at CRT monitors. Instead, they function almost psychologically, as sonic representations of memory itself: slightly pixelated, incomplete, emotionally vivid despite their technical simplicity.

It is an inspired choice.

Memory rarely arrives in high definition.

Around these shimmering electronic figures, Reinertsen constructs surprisingly lush arrangements. Flute, bass clarinet, saxophone, trumpet and subtle programming intermingle with Erik Nylander's wonderfully responsive drumming and Eivind Lønning's restrained trumpet work. Rather than creating dramatic contrasts between acoustic and electronic instruments, the trio allows them to dissolve into one another until distinctions become irrelevant.

Nylander's contribution deserves particular praise.

His drumming rarely provides straightforward pulse. Instead, rhythms constantly shift, hesitate and reconfigure themselves, introducing small disruptions that prevent the songs from ever becoming too comfortable. There is movement throughout the album, but it feels dreamlike rather than mechanical, as though each groove were remembering how it used to dance.

Reinertsen's voice may initially surprise listeners more familiar with his work as a saxophonist.

Soft, vulnerable and almost conversational, it carries little of the theatrical flourish often associated with experimental pop. Instead, he sings with remarkable restraint, allowing fragility to become expressive rather than dramatic. His delivery occasionally recalls the emotional openness of Robert Wyatt, though without imitation, while remaining entirely his own. Over repeated listens the voice gradually becomes less a focal point than another carefully integrated texture within the album's unusually rich sonic ecology.

The songs themselves seem deliberately resistant to grand statements.

Reinertsen has suggested that there are no overarching themes beyond whatever listeners choose to discover. Yet recurring images of memory, bodies, oceans and shifting identities quietly accumulate. The remarkable "Muskelminner fra arkanoidepoken" ("Muscle Memories from the Arkanoid Era") perhaps captures the album's emotional core most clearly, intertwining nostalgic electronic timbres with reflections on physical and emotional memory in ways that feel simultaneously playful and deeply melancholic.

It is impossible not to smile at a record capable of making vintage computer sounds feel genuinely moving.

Human beings, after all, possess a curious talent for attaching profound emotions to objects originally designed to produce cheerful beeps while tiny spaceships destroyed geometric shapes.

The closing title track offers perhaps the album's finest synthesis of its many contradictions. What begins as a gentle ballad slowly expands into a luminous instrumental coda where electronics, winds and subtle rhythmic transformations seem to drift beyond the song itself. One senses Reinertsen becoming increasingly interested in atmosphere without abandoning melody, in abstraction without sacrificing intimacy.
Throughout "Venus er i håret", beauty emerges not from perfection but from constant transformation.

Nothing remains static for long. Harmonies bloom unexpectedly before dissolving. Rhythms mutate almost imperceptibly. Familiar sonic references continually acquire new meanings. The album's emotional landscape feels suspended somewhere between waking memory and hypnagogic imagination, where details remain strangely vivid even as their original contexts disappear.

There is also admirable confidence in its pacing.

With only five compositions spread across nearly forty minutes, Reinertsen allows every musical idea sufficient room to unfold organically. Instrumental passages never feel indulgent, nor do vocal sections appear merely transitional. Instead, each piece breathes according to its own internal logic, unconcerned with conventional song duration or commercial efficiency.

Perhaps that is what makes "Venus er i håret" so quietly affecting.

It never insists upon its originality, despite possessing plenty of it.

Instead, Reinertsen simply invites listeners into a deeply personal world where avant-pop, chamber music, folktronica, jazz and dreamlike songwriting coexist without anxiety over categorization. The result is not experimental for its own sake, but exploratory in the truest sense: curious, generous and open-ended.

Venus may indeed be hiding somewhere in the hair.

More importantly, Reinertsen reminds us that sometimes the smallest, strangest sounds carry the longest memories.

Some albums age like fine wine. Others age like a forgotten cheeseburger under the back seat of a tour van. And then there are Electric Six records, which somehow manage to remain exactly as gloriously ridiculous as the day they were conceived. They exist outside the normal laws of musical entropy, trapped in a parallel universe where disco, garage rock, glam, punk, arena hooks and absurdist comedy all signed a legally dubious coexistence agreement.

Originally released in 2007, "I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being The Master" arrived during a particularly prolific period for the Detroit collective. By then, many listeners still associated Electric Six almost exclusively with the twin cultural detonations of "Danger! High Voltage" and "Gay Bar", assuming the band had already played every card in its deck of innuendo, satire and dancefloor mayhem. Instead, Dick Valentine and company quietly continued building one of alternative rock's most consistently entertaining catalogues, releasing albums at a pace that suggested sleep was an optional lifestyle choice.

This remastered edition, finally making its debut on vinyl as an expanded double LP through Metropolis Records, does more than simply polish an old favourite. It reminds us that the record occupied a fascinating position in the band's evolution. The novelty factor that many critics insisted upon had already worn off. What's left is a band remarkably comfortable with its own contradictions.

Electric Six have always been difficult to categorise, largely because they seem determined to sabotage any attempt at doing so. They can sound like a glam-rock revue interrupted by a post-punk DJ, a garage band accidentally wandering into Studio 54, or Devo after spending too much time watching late-night infomercials. Their songs frequently begin as one genre before gleefully abandoning it halfway through, as though stylistic consistency were an embarrassing social convention best ignored.

The title itself feels like performance art disguised as megalomania. It is hilariously overblown, yet oddly revealing. Beneath the comic excess lies a recurring fascination with power, identity, consumer culture and self-mythologising. Valentine's lyrics often resemble the ramblings of a charismatic salesman who's simultaneously trying to recruit you into a cult and sell you discounted household appliances. The joke, however, is usually aimed at the narrator himself.

Musically, the album rarely stays still long enough to become predictable. "It's Showtime!" opens like the curtains rising on a gloriously chaotic cabaret before "Down at McDonellzzz" launches into one of the band's trademark collisions between infectious hooks and deliciously juvenile social commentary. "Dance Pattern" and "Rip It!" continue the momentum with rhythms seemingly engineered for awkward dancing, while "Feed My Fuckin' Habit" compresses reckless energy into barely two minutes without ever feeling rushed.

Elsewhere, "When I Get To The Green Building" reveals a surprisingly melodic core beneath the band's perpetual smirk, hinting that Electric Six could probably write straightforward radio-friendly rock if they weren't having far too much fun derailing expectations. "Dirty Looks" closes the original sequence on an unexpectedly triumphant note, its expansive arrangement demonstrating that beneath all the jokes lies a band with an instinctive understanding of dynamics and structure.

That has always been Electric Six's secret weapon. It is easy to laugh with them. It is much harder to notice how carefully these songs are assembled. The humour works because the musicianship never feels disposable. The grooves genuinely groove, the riffs remain satisfyingly sharp, and Valentine's theatrical vocal delivery possesses impeccable comic timing without sacrificing musicality.

The bonus material adds welcome perspective rather than functioning as mere archival filler. The cover of Harry Nilsson's "One" transforms melancholic introspection into something rougher and more muscular without completely abandoning the song's loneliness. It illustrates one of the band's recurring talents: appropriating familiar material while making it sound unmistakably like an Electric Six performance rather than a respectful museum exhibit. The demos and remix similarly offer enjoyable glimpses into the creative machinery without diminishing the polished absurdity of the finished record.

The remaster itself avoids the common temptation of confusing loudness with improvement. Instead, instruments enjoy greater separation, bass lines carry more physical weight, and the layered guitars breathe with renewed clarity. The result preserves the album's raw exuberance while allowing its surprisingly intricate arrangements to emerge more naturally.

Nearly two decades later, "I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being The Master" feels less like a relic and more like evidence that irony and sincerity never needed to be sworn enemies. Electric Six understand that humour ages best when built upon genuine craftsmanship rather than disposable punchlines. Their music laughs at rock's inflated ego while simultaneously embracing every glorious excess the genre has to offer.

Perhaps that explains why this album continues to resonate. In an era increasingly obsessed with carefully curated authenticity, Electric Six remain magnificently artificial, cartoonishly excessive and joyfully impossible to pin down. They remind us that intelligence need not wear a serious face, and that sometimes the quickest route to saying something truthful is through a joke delivered at full volume under a mirror ball.

Not every band can make disco-punk sound like both a party and an existential crisis. Electric Six have been doing exactly that for three decades, and judging by this vibrant remaster, they still haven't exhausted the wonderfully absurd possibilities of the formula. Some restrictions, thankfully, were never meant to survive.

Some records introduce themselves politely. [KAAARST] kicks the door with the body of a bass guitar, then apologizes by humming a strangely beautiful melody. Humanity, as usual, is perfectly capable of making elegance out of blunt force.

French bassist Antoine Ferris has been an active presence in Toulouse's adventurous improvised music scene through projects such as Baraque à Free, Megacoaster, Feràmia and Totun, developing a vocabulary that treats the electric bass as anything but a conventional low-end instrument. Across those ensembles, and through collaborations with composers and improvisers, he has cultivated an approach where electronics, hip-hop production aesthetics, noise, and free improvisation are not competing languages but different dialects of the same conversation. [KAAARST], his first solo statement, feels less like a debut than the moment when years of accumulated experiments finally found a coherent gravitational centre.

Calling this a bass album would be technically correct in the same way calling a volcano "warm geology" would also be technically correct. Ferris continuously dismantles the identity of his instrument. Strings become percussion, feedback becomes melody, contact microphones amplify microscopic gestures, effects pedals generate unstable rhythmic companions that behave almost like stubborn improvisers rather than obedient machines. At times he attacks the instrument with his fists, elsewhere with a butter knife, turning performance into a peculiar choreography where every object seems equally qualified to become a musical tool.

Yet despite all this apparent violence, [KAAARST] never settles for noise as spectacle. The abrasive textures are consistently shadowed by melancholy. There is an emotional hesitation beneath the distortion, as though every burst of sonic aggression immediately questions itself. The album lives inside that contradiction, finding tenderness in abrasion and vulnerability inside mechanical repetition.

The sequencing reinforces this fragmented emotional geography. The miniature opener "crush" barely has time to introduce itself before dissolving, while "strange party" assembles fractured grooves from unstable rhythmic cells that flirt with electronic music without ever surrendering to predictable structures. Pieces like "hount orbe" and "coume sourde" stretch improvisation into something almost geological, allowing feedback and resonance to evolve with patient inevitability. Even the provocatively titled "electronic dance music" seems to smile ironically at genre expectations: if anyone arrives expecting club anthems, they may discover instead that dancing can also happen inside one's nervous system.

Ferris' fascination with electronic production is especially compelling because it never attempts to disguise the physicality of performance. Sampling techniques borrowed from beat-making coexist with unmistakably tactile instrumental gestures. Every scrape, strike and accidental resonance preserves the memory of hands touching wood and metal. The electronics do not erase the performer; they magnify the traces of his presence until every imperfection acquires structural importance.

The collaborative moments provide welcome shifts in perspective without interrupting the album's identity. Natacha Kanga's contribution to "shame's coming" introduces a fragile vocal dimension that contrasts beautifully with Ferris' fragmented instrumental language, while Louie Z's Occitan singing on "la nèu" anchors the record in a sense of place and cultural memory. The use of an endangered regional language feels quietly significant: amid all the digital manipulation and sonic deconstruction, an ancient voice appears, reminding us that experimentation does not require abandoning history.

There are echoes throughout the record of artists who have expanded the vocabulary of the electric bass and electroacoustic improvisation, yet Ferris avoids sounding derivative. His references to industrial music, glitch aesthetics, hip-hop production and free improvisation remain ingredients rather than destinations. The album constantly resists becoming too comfortable within any single tradition, preferring instead to occupy the unstable terrain between them.

The title itself suggests rugged landscapes shaped over immense stretches of time, and that metaphor proves surprisingly apt. These pieces often feel eroded rather than constructed. Sounds emerge like exposed mineral layers, revealing hidden colours beneath rough surfaces. Even the shortest tracks function as sedimentary deposits, each preserving tiny sonic fossils that resonate long after they disappear.

For listeners accustomed to clearly defined genres, [KAAARST] may initially resemble an elaborate puzzle whose picture never appears on the box. That is precisely its strength. Ferris trusts curiosity more than certainty, inviting repeated listening rather than immediate comprehension. The album rewards attention to detail: the unstable pulse hiding beneath distortion, the unexpected lyricism surfacing through feedback, the rhythmic intelligence concealed inside apparent chaos.

In an era where software can simulate almost any instrumental gesture with alarming efficiency, Antoine Ferris reminds us that unpredictability remains profoundly human. Sometimes all it takes is a bass guitar, a handful of pedals, questionable kitchen utensils, and the willingness to let accidents become collaborators. The result is an album that feels simultaneously raw and meticulously considered, proving that even broken signals can carry remarkably honest messages.