Prolific doesn’t come close: with forty releases to his name since arriving in 2014, Osaka’s Takahiro Mukai makes everyone else’s output seem, well, pretty amateur. His latest album for UK cassette imprint Cruel Nature continue’s Mukai’s exploration of a refracted, splintered form of electronic music, one principally informed by the limitless pulses and twitches of minimal techno but nudged toward its expansive, borderless frontiers. To be able to deliver this level of output and still produce something that’s consistently engaging without continually repeating yourself is Mukai’s principal conceit.

The tracks here range from the insectoid scratching of ‘#207’ to the crazy elasticity of ‘#210’, through to the robust rhythms of ‘#211. You get the impression that it would be all too easy for Mukai to settle into the predictable beats and tropes associated with the thirty plus year legacy of techno, and tracks like ‘#218’ carry an energy and urgency that is perpetually on the edge of coalescing into something firmer. ‘#212’ has a skittish, irrepressibly elusive quality with sounds that seem to spring at you from obscure angles, while ‘#214’ sounds like a malfunctioning machine trying to pick up any trace of a signal on some barren alien landscape.

Paraponera Clavata by Takahiro Mukai is out now on Cruel Nature Records.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2019 Further.