Bleep

So much music gets labelled 'timeless' and 'futuristic' these days, yet few records truly stand the test of time of a few months, let alone years. Enter Lab Rat XL's 2003 album Mice Or Cyborg, the last album of the series of the seven Drexciya Storms, and one of the most future-proofed records to ever grace our turntable. Mice Or Cyborg followed on from Shifted Phases The Cosmic Memoirs Of The Late Great Rupert J. Rosinthrope and Transllusion's L.I.F.E. to complete the seven storm cycle. Even after all these years, it's an utterly captivating, life-changing experience from start to finish, one of those albums that everyone and their mate should own a copy of.

Upon its original incarnation, Mice Or Cyborg instantly stunned a generation of listeners with its jagged, angular electro sound. Little were we to know at the time what the future held, yet listening back now it's striking how melancholic the music feels, whether this is just us looking back with a glazed expression and history on our side or it was James Stinson laying clues for what laid ahead, we will never truly know.

With vinyl copies of the original edition and 2008's repress increasingly hard to track down, Clone's excellent Aqualung series has succumbed to many of our wishes and issued this freshly cut press of the most daringly different collection of Detroit electro machine soul songs to vinyl once more.

While you can spend days trawling the internet looking for information and clues that will try to unravel the mystery forever locked within the heart of these recordings, we'd suggest just bagging a copy as fast as you can and immersing yourself as deep as you can dive into the mind of this once in a lifetime music and musician.

It's impossible to overstate the importance of Mice Or Cyborg, possibly the most important music to stem from the mind of the once in a lifetime truck driver, musician and guiding light artist from Detroit... James Marcel Stinson - RIP.