Following last year’s tremendous Tascam Space Season, Evil Fades Into Echo is a second session from talented friends, Taka Noda and Danny “Legowelt” Wolfers. The 7 tracks, this time, while still sorta rooted in reggae (check the digidub bass and thunderclap cymbals), travel in a more trance / techno direction. The drum machine rhythms – occasionally tripping over themselves in delay – are still of a mutant dancehall / Sleng Teng tempo but the what sounds like improvised analogue jamming leans more toward computerised cosmic than synthetic steppers. Plus there’s always a TB-303 boiling away in the background.

A line can perhaps be drawn from Om Unit’s Acid Dub Studies to here, but Noda & Wolfers’ new stuff is far busier, far more boisterous. Eschewing hypnotic inner space journeys, the Moog-y madness on occasion incorporating `80s 8-bit arcade game effects, a la Jahtari. The results of this noisy knob-twiddling are certainly not chillout.

Programmed percussion, via an echoed 808, pays tribute to hip hop / electro and George Clinton’s plugged-in, Atomic Dog P-Funk, and in places, Midnight Shift At Utopia Planetia, for example, the pieces are not slow or skanking but jumpin’ and pumpin’. Practically pogoing. However, throughout Noda’s melodies provide a countering calm. On flute – I think – he conjures a kind of pastoral kosmische. On his trademark melodica he forgoes Augustus Pablo’s righteous Far East sound, and instead riffs on Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western scores. Not bad, but good. Not ugly, but gnarly.

Noda & Wolfers’ Evil Fades In Echo is out now on Nightwind Records.