Snoopy is hard to follow up. The same brilliant musicality is lavished on Orange — a combination of unmistakably original, skittering drum programming, startlingly fresh instrumental interjections, creepily invocatory voices, and dubwise treatments — giddily imbued with the dark arts of ritual and seance. But Orange is more gripping, focussed and urgent, more intense and ambitious. Next level.

Its first quarter presents a trio of forays in suspense.
Bassline squares up like an epic psych-funk grinder, with a moody guitar line traversed by ticking drum patterns and faint electric crackle. In no time the guitar is staggering and stammering under the duress of echo and distortion, and over-run with percussive electronics and the first of the voices massing in the music’s head. The mood has quickly become more trepidatious. We’re deeper underground; it’s gloomier, wetter.
Shred propulsively ratchets up the tension and menace. Glazily tentative xylophone is played against slashing, nervy cello. The voices are more strangulated and sick now. Flutes and chimes evoke the same kind of beautiful, contaminated efflorescence which is pictured on the LP’s front cover.
Voice Of The Spider makes easier progress across this cavernous, shadowy, dripping terrain, with funky pads and Nasty, eighties, No Wave electric bass; woozy chimes, non-plussed keys, singing-in-tongues.

Pink Mist marks an arrival, or unbottling, with annunciatory church-organ and choral voices from the off, and a newly relaxed, head-nodding kosmische rhythm.

Mandarin is a short, beat-less and voice-free interlude for piano and bass. It’s reflective and nostalgic, ambivalent and inconclusive, with a lovely snatch of melody. A bridge half-way.

Would You Like A Vampire is a triumphant, mesmerizing go at New Folk, with strummed acoustic guitar, descant song, and jazzily restless drum programming (including a tasty bass-bin trembler). Amazingly, Conrad Standish is joined at the mic by none other than Bridget St John. Together they sing ‘Earth is Paradise’ so repeatedly and tremulously — and the song is cut off so abruptly at the end — it seems as if the verb is teetering on the past tense, and hymn fading into valediction and catastrophe.

In the same line of thought, Storm Rips Banana Tree begins idyllically enough, with a CS-&-Kreme-style raga… before something like an immense, obliterative drill starts up. Harpsichord and organ — by James Rushford — and flutes, and clapping, distant chanting and insectile percussion steadily leaven the dread, till finally all that is left is lapping water.
It’s an epic, deeply immersive, compelling, thought-provoking, twenty-minute finale… the coup de grâce.

The very first Basic Channel.
A quarter of an hour of Enforcement, plus a Jeff Mills remix, and an ameliorative dub.
Still thrillingly no-prisoners and 100% unmissable.

With a Regis remix.

Hip hop trooper Davy D’s vinyl debut, in late 1983. Still buzzing and fresh.

Two deep half-steppers; both killer.

‘The opener is a statement of intent — frazzled, shuffling drums, ketamine oud, heavy sub bass — something like Wordsound’s Scarab zooming out of the 90s into the future. Tombaroli is a head nodder, with insistent percussion and banging pulse. A lysergic fever-dream, Bullet Holes dips into spooked psychedelia; No Minus sounds like a distant cousin of DJ Premier’s production Come Clean, for Jeru.
‘Channel 83 lands us back in the club for a rib-rattling stomp, weaving mystical soundsystem magic with its stunted horns and swirling voices. The grimy judder of Expect Excerpt slides proceedings down to a bleary-eyed half-speed, like a party which won’t let you leave. Mount Point is a welcome release, an early morning sunrise — rich, slow, and shimmering — before Landings Dub signals the end of the journey with a metallic elegy; both a summing up of the record, and the contemplation of your flipping it, and re-entering the world of Detraex Corp.’