NVPR is comprised of Factory Floor’s Nik Void and Peter Rehberg, head of underground record label Editions Mego. Both artists typically operate in the spaces between techno, experimental and the avant-garde. 33 33 could be described as the latter.

The five-track release starts with Meantime (Part 4). Bad-tempered robotic life communicates over fractured rhythms; what sounds like a squash ball gets leathered into a wall, repeatedly, while some notes phase in sporadically and a bass drum pulses like a heartbeat. This intriguing, disorientating start is followed by Twin Cases, a tinnitus-provoking listen. Meantime follows; more subdued, but more menacing, the sounds of organic decay splitting apart. Free Founder sounds like an old computer that’s not so much reading a floppy disk as chewing it. It’s somehow one of the more accessible tracks on the album.

33 33 wraps up with DEABG. Describing the track is difficult, but try imagining several modular synths having a fight in a metallic cage full of stainless steel dustbin lids, scrapping then trash-talking, while distorted white noise starts to build and synth lines compete for dominance. And it crescendos. Several radios try to hack your ears at once, the thin, glassy attack of the synths layering over an increasingly hyperactive melody. It’s an incredibly difficult listen, and it’s the culmination of two artists’ body of work in sonic experimentalism, the spiked sign-off of their latest discombobulating creation.

Robert Bates