There’s a novel primitiveness to Black Body Radiation, October’s Skudge-released debut album. The Bristol based producer channels a raw physicality through his punk tangled techno, rounding up influences in industrial, EBM and coldwave and squeezing them into a propulsive darkness, exploring the physicality of electronic music through a fully realised vision. Opening track Ritual is a finger stubbing gorge of downcast synth stabs and serrated snare work. Its tone is unashamedly boisterous and prickly, like a sadistic Tangerine Dream dubplate re-edited in John Carpenter’s sound studio.

And, in essence, this total disregard for 4/4 club compromising is a crucial step forward Julian Smith. As October, he has frequently veered left when the trend steers right. However, with the underground’s current reassessment of rave culture and realigning of electronic liberation, Black Body Radiation seems to act as a continuation of this discourse rather than retaliation against it. Tracks such as Blood Feud and Transient Bodies, while following fixed time signatures, be- guile with sonic abstractions and textures. Across eight brutal slabs of tough industrial weirdness, October’s rage is strictly confined to composed bursts of analogous violence.

Tom Watson