Shirk (LP)

Sam Shalabi - best known for playing in Land of Kush and Praed Orchestra!, and collaborating with Oren Ambarchi, Mark Fell and Alan Bishop - fuses synthpop and sound poetry on this utterly crackpot set featuring Eric Chenaux and Nadah El-Shazly.

Sam Shalabi has been active for decades now, working first in the late 1970s in punk bands before recording with Montréal's Swamp Circuit in the 1990s. He's performed extensively with Constellation's network of artists (from Fly Pan Am to A Silver Mt. Zion) and formed a litany of his own outfits, including Shalabi Effect and Land of Kush, but here his scope is markedly slimmed down, giving him the opportunity to once again work on an exploratory, instinctive agenda.

His sounds here are freeform and unpredictable, swerving from Daniel Johnston-esque pop to processed electronics and spooky elevator music. Nadah El-Shazly deadpans over plastique synth strings on the opening side of "Shirk". Her commentary is firmly tongue in cheek ("I'll finally be able to walk like an Egyptian") and adds a lightheartedness to Shalabi's surrealist pop experiments. On the flipside, surreal vocals are played against laptop and foley sounds, while chipmunked poetry is layered over synapse-swallowing sine wave wails. The entire composition builds towards an explosion of ring modulated pop that sounds as if the 1980s pop scene crashed into a hallucinatory wall.

There's not much out there as oddly particular, studied and uncompromisingly absurd as this - which is in itself high praise.