Unknown CD

It took Extrawelt some five years to get round to recording last year's wonderfully expansive and on-point "Fear of an Extra Planet", a willfully eclectic album that remains a high point of their production career. Happily, "Unknown", their fourth album, didn't take nearly as long to gestate. Interestingly, it's more tightly focused than previous outings, consisting almost entirely of electro workouts. While there are subtle nuances and incremental shifts throughout - a little more acid here, a nod to early '90s IDM there, and regular tempo changes throughout - the majority of the album is as spacey, weighty and punchy as you'd expect. It's almost as if the German duo has spent the last year exclusively listening to Drexciya and Central Processing Unit records. Superb stuff.