Tone Rec’s music might sound like a serie of mistakes: each track has a line with starting and ending points, and between those moments anything can happen—and to echo Murray Walker, it usually does.

Take Pholcus as a starting point; the opener kicks off with some metronomic clicks immersed in a pulsing high-end noise before being abruptly interrupted by reverberating chimes and piercing drums. Subsequent tracks see tone changes, volume changes, the introduction of brittle snapping for percussion.

A track like Voice Onset Time consists solely of various grainy, looped drones intersecting over the course of 11 minutes. The loops are running in desyncronised ways to create unexpected rhythms. As an album, it keeps drawing you right into mix, as if the sounds are being generated inside your heart, then it’ll suddenly makes out as if the music is coming from several buildings away, the frequency of the sounds changing accordingly.

This is not some contrived mathematical lab experiment; neither predeterminated structural model, nor theoretical approach for the music. Much of the band’s music is basically a form of heavily deconstructed techno hardly inaccessible in its basic format, but highly innovative all the same.

From John Gibson’s Article Nov 1998 Newcastle UK