Finally, after a long long wait, the first new SND album proper in almost 7 years drops on the wonderful Raster Noton label. Followers of these pages will no doubt be aware of our long, drawn-out love affair with this project, beginning back in 1998 with the anonymous arrival of their first self-released 12", through the series of albums produced for Mille Plateaux, the 'Blir' releases and all the way up to last year's amazing '4,5,6' triplepack. The sound they make is an oblique and utterly unparalleled variant of minimalism - a kind of oddly shaped integration of academic concepts guided by a strict aesthetic methodology coupled with an almost alien, funked-up intuition. Listening to an SND record can throw you into sonically unsettling terrain one minute, before dragging you into misshaped, involuntary rhythmic moves the next. "Atavism" carries on more or less exactly from where '4,5,6' left off, but in places develops into a full-blown rhythmic assault that will leave you in a state of demented awe. Tracks like " 02:13:69" or " 05:36:58" engage in the most fluid and decipherable floor-friendly machinations SND have explored in a while, but the amazing thing about this music is how quickly it throws up odd time signatures and skewed arrangements, composed and refined with the barest ingredients. Atavism is truly a work of incomparable wonder - drawn up with an icy, functionalist armour with just the narrowest window into its warm, pulsating soul. A huge recommendation = Essential Purchase. (BOOMKAT)