To add to the already heady expectations triggered by this impressive roll call that spans the globe from the States’ David Grubbs through Britain’s Fred Frith to Australia’s Oren Ambarchi, the notes accompanying the release bravely state that the work focuses on “the formal coordinates and techniques of Dub music”. However, anyone expecting either reggae’s depth-charge riddims or the signature sounds of any one of the nineteen artists joining in the fun will be disappointed. This album, especially when listened to without knowledge of who’s on what track, is a coherent series of eighteen short but complicated sound collages that use dub’s tenacious manipulations to create irregular, kaleidoscopic sound objects that only occasionally allow regular rhythms to emerge from the flux.

The most conventionally dub-like is perhaps the fifth track made with drummer Jan Thoben. Alongside Hegenbart’s wrenching, crackling and fizzing arsenal that populates the entire album, Thoben’s loping dread rhythm bathed in spring reverb swims unsteadily over a smoky cloud of bass tones, this time cut with stretched speech samples, maybe alluding to a sound system deejay. Along with a few other tracks (track 7 with Sascha Demand, 8 with Fred Frith and 12 with Martin Brandlmayr) where elusive passages of regular rhythms hang around for long enough to nod your head more than a couple of times, it reminds of Mille Plateaux’s Clicks’n’Cuts series that pitched dub strategies against glitch-ridden electronica in the nineties. But even these four pieces sound like lucidly dreamt dub techno as they’re strongly interrupted or overcome by the real life rhythms of trains, speech fragments, poured liquid and whining or whirring mechanisms.

When recognisable rhythms do emerge from the fidgeting fusion our linguistic, pattern-hungry brains grasp out to retain its regularity while Hegenbart’s array of swiftly switching sound objects require a deeper, more sensual listening mode to drink in their rich textures. This courageous and precarious meeting point at the edges of improv, sound art and electronica makes for an extraordinary, if unsettling, listen requiring several revisits to reveal the multi-layered, deftly recorded details that refuse to sit still for long enough to be fully comprehended.