7/10

Kai Moa’s debut EP 'Some of My Best Friends Are...Electric Sheep' feels almost like a series of trapdoors. Just when one idea appears settled, another opens beneath it, sending the EP somewhere even stranger.

Across the four-t6rack collection, the Birmingham producer pulls IDM, ambient music, industrial electronics, jazz and techno into the same orbit without allowing any one influence to dominate. That restless approach places him somewhere between the cerebral detail of Autechre and Aphex Twin and the more emotional, atmospheric worlds associated with Boards of Canada, but his own background as a professional drummer gives the material a particularly physical edge.

That aesthetic becomes especially clear on the previously unreleased opening track '≠ What It Is'. It begins in fractured, metallic territory, with glitching rhythms suggesting a cityscape gradually breaking apart, before drifting towards something far more spacious. Piano chords and psychedelic jazz textures begin to emerge, only for the producer to unleash a frantic drum passage that pushes the arrangement towards breaking point.

Then everything changes again. The track snaps into dark techno, replacing spaciousness with club pressure and turning what initially feels cinematic into something much more immediate. It's a bold introduction, but more importantly, it demonstrates how naturally he moves between ideas that should probably clash.

It's a philosophy that runs through the entire project. Even the Kai Moa name itself plays with the idea of the chimera, and the music follows suit by exploring separate musical identities and stitching them together until the joins become part of the appeal.

Adventurous, immersive and refreshingly difficult to categorise, 'Some of My Best Friends Are...Electric Sheep' is an impressive debut from a producer who seems far more interested in discovering what electronic music can become than deciding what it is supposed to be.