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Initial signs are certainly far from promising. Firstly there's the group name, then that album title, followed by the discovery of a seventeen-minute 'journey' two tracks in. The fact that those seventeen minutes are entitled Level 4.2 is also surely drifting far too close to a daunting slap-bass precipice. Swiftly re-affirming the idea that first impressions can so often be wrong though, this is actually a highly intriguing, highly compulsive release. Existing somewhere between the worlds of post-rock, krautrock and downtempo electronica, AOP stretch throbbing digital fuzzes and plucked guitar flashes plus a whole load of space-age effects into one completely melancholic movement. This is a seamless near-synthesis of Labradford, Tortoise, Neu! and 'Ambient Works'-era Aphex Twin with aching basslines and some lovely Bernard Sumner-like guitar playing. AOP direct deep instrumental background rhythms that gradually force themselves out of the shadows and into the foreground. If the Cocteau Twins were born into 2002 without Liz Fraser and with strung-out Boards Of Canada obsessions, their minor-key science would have designs resembling something like this. As BOC themselves implore, music is math.

Ian Fletcher
CWAS #11 - Autumn 2002

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