I Tweet A Birdy Electric by Icarus (BAY36CDP)

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It starts off with some tiny clicking, a plangent drone and some delicately picked strings which then build and shift and mutate like a cloud formation or waves on water until a couple of minutes of live breakbeats shatter the growing calm and bring the 8 minute plus opening track "Ganglion" to a finish. The rest of the record has trouble living up to the magnificence of this stunning piece of music, reminiscent at once of some Rune Grammafon stuff, Four Tet in a more extreme moment, or Plaid out in a beautiful place in the country.

It's indicative of what Icarus do here, however - acoustic and electronic sounds mingle, clash and bounce off each other throughout the whole record. Sometimes it sounds like a challenge, other times a harmony, but you sense that part of Icarus' project is sounding out the limits of the natural world, finding where organic sound becomes electronic sound, where the "natural" becomes "treated".

"Essen" takes a simple piano figure and turns it upside down, inside out, letting us see and hear it from dozens of different perspectives at once. "Gnog" does a similar thing with string sounds, stretching them out until they sound like the woeful animal entrails strings would once have been made from. "Jokun's Civet" and "Birdz Max" (titles which sound like Autechre having swallowed an ornithology textbook) use bird sounds - or is it high-pitched electronic whirring?

Similar to Dorine Muraille, Fridge, the last Matmos record, Colleen or the aforementioned Four Tet both in sound and intent, Icarus' "I Tweet the Birdy Electric" sets a new highpoint in the field - an incredibly densely layered and textured recording which nevertheless manages to sound light and effortless, however occasionally tricky and difficult.