Chaos and Precision

Half of an upcoming glitch/beats album by MTCH, hkyrbnnpkmdtvovgjr (if something is encoded in that letter slurry, please lemme know), is up now for streaming, and it’s a fantastic set of frazzled IDM, full of heady echoes of Autechre and Monolake, with a vibrant arrhythmia that suggests live coding at work. Here and there are ominous drones, from which snatches of whirling effects, bounding percussion, and cybernetic beats emerge. It’s sound-design techno, breaking noises into fragments and moving them around with the subgenre’s trademark mix of chaos and precision — artisanal pick-up sticks tossed into a cyclone. Tracks like “kjbg” and “5_bstrckt” resemble a sonification of a subroutine attempting to take matters into its own hands (or lack thereof). The full album comes out Friday, June 6, on the label EVEL, which — at least based on its social media and Bandcamp pages — maintains a geographic ambiguity.