Shape Of My Voice

It's hard to place Shape Of My Voice from the little-known Tokyo producer Jun Kimata. It's part-meditative drone techno, part-unfashionable wiggy trance, but the tension between these two sounds, plus a generous dose of the surreal, makes for beguiling music. This is best illustrated on the opening track "Two Billion Light-Years Of Silence." There's something weirdly plastic to its electroid beat and droning, throbbing chords-a synthetic universe in which a vocoded voice, hollow and reedy, sounds right at home. The voice recites a sequence of letters, round and round, while the arrangement swells and recedes.

"Train Music" twists the same materials into a slightly different shape. The beat is all crisp, clipped claps, while the vocal-this time in pitched-up Japanese-is goofier and Kimata's space-age sound design is softened by a housey chord stab. This detracts from the music's strange ambiguity, though the track remains engrossing, hitting swirling peak moments which disintegrate like fog on a warming morning. An equally bizarre ambient number separates the two tracks. "Track 2" finds a coherent thread trough vocoded Barbershop chords, deflating-balloon squeals and rich, turbulent drone. Andres Aguirre's "Spicy Paracousia Mix" of "Train Music" completes the release, but lacks the blend of colours that makes Kimata's originals so distinctive.