Ikue Mori makes a fresh judgment on dance music with her Class Insecta. Her uplifting and unfamiliar shifts of rhythmic emphasis are primarily derived from traditional jungle and house templates. To varying degrees, their voices crisscross as an improv hardy perennial and yet, through the delicacy and rigor characteristic of electronica, they still manage to stay on track, partaking of an experiment in controlled openness.

With "Walking Sticks" Mori bounds through rhythmic tics and mechanisms that slide in and out of sync, awash in slippery, sidereal atmospherics and mucoid textures. Together these elements form a mesh, which tarries with the limits of syncopation, and which moves the body in new ways. Different combinations and juxtapositions arise on a track such as "Luciol". Many of the same elements appear, but their presence is by no means as clear. Under the arm of some byzantine programming, the breathing space, inflections, and natural unevenness of the textural minutiae is not given over to pre-emptive decision, but is laid open in its rough charm. A good deal of the album's allure stems from the fact that Mori's audio sleights of hand and trompe l'oreille extravagances only heighten imagistic speculation and composed expression. These may very well be rootless hybrids, but Mori is quick to make them crucial in their insubstantiality.

This is furthered all the more when the two aforementioned realms shelter each other, when they are haunted by one another, breaking down their respective notions of activity, and gravitating toward a vigorous, communal process of push and shove. During a single piece, they can thus be found both nudging the prevailing thrust a particular way and then later gluing the strands together.

Mori is constantly changing the texture, shape and density of the music. Despite this fact, infectious themes and wild excursions spring from a common creative source. All of it comes as an exploitative rush, an astonished and alert sprawl, inhuman, intimate, and irresistible.

Ikue Mori: Class Insecta Is On Sale at Squidco!