Luca Mortarello (Lucy) and Seth Horvitz (Rrose, Sutekh) join forces once more as Lotus Eater, generating buzzing psychedelic industrial techno wobblers using feedback, synthesized sound and what sounds like a re-amplified ground hum. Psychoacoustic bangers for fans of Sleeparchive, Sähkö, or even Wata Igarashi.

Trust Stroboscopic Artefacts boss Luca Mortarello and longtime psychoacoustic researcher Seth Horvitz to rustle up one of the trippiest sets of inverted techno we’ve heard in a minute. “Plasma” is the sophomore album from the duo’s Lotus Eater project, and refines the sound they began to explore on their debut “Desatura”. After a pre-pandemic tour and some time to sit with their ideas over lockdown, Mortarello and Horvitz return with a sparse, disorienting study of rhythm, texture and illusion – it’s a dizzying listening experience. Anyone who’s seen Rrose perform live will already know Horvitz’s skill in playing with elements usually off the table in dance music. He uses sounds and textures that might usually only crop up in academic music (or possibly psytrance, natch), assembling them into rhythmic forms that vibrate with unnatural funk. Mortarello’s Lucy material is similarly kinetic, and the two artists channel their experience into a run of tracks that sound consistently challenging, while constantly retaining a powerful dancefloor pulse.

‘Pendulum’ starts off like Richie Hawtin’s epochal “Consumed”, with cavernous blips and ASMR saws leading into barely-there percussion and unsettling foghorn blasts. It’s techno on some level – both artists are inseparable from the genre at this stage – but Horwitz and Mortarello’s motivation to experiment allows the tracks to pull away from the blueprint. It’s easy to imagine it playing on a 4D soundsystem as it is at Berghain or Tresor.

But “Plasma” is also, at times, punishingly bleak. ‘Wishing Well’ is slowed to a gruesome crawl, sounding like a broken machine at the bottom of the well in Hideo Nakata’s “Ring”, and ‘Tunnel’ sounds exactly as you’d expect, like a heartbeat lost in a pungent mess of subterranean catacombs. ‘Intracluster’ meanwhile is a rare beatless moment, made up of thrumming feedback and eye-crossing bass womps, and ‘Stars’ lightens the mood only slightly with twinkling synthesized electronics that should be familiar to anyone au fair with the Rrose canon.

An absorbing, first-rate set of sonic hallucinations assembled by two master craftspeople. Whether you’re gonna want to dive in or not is gonna depend on the amount of psilocybin chocolate you can source, no doubt.