Bleep

After debuting on Haunter Records with 2018’s First Grade, Advanced Audio Research returns to the label with another set of post-rave experiments in the form of Top Secret. There is a mania to Top Secret that is at once foreboding and playful, a feeling that it shares with records by EVOL and Gabber Eleganza. Many of the tracks here sound like hardcore, jungle or gabber tunes struggling for air, their beats splitting into component parts (the eerie ‘Titanium Bells’) or kicking into overdrive and ending up as something like breakcore (‘Gandalf’).