- Chris Abrahams has, like an abscess building up a head of evil goo, been saving up some more solo madness, from when he’s not doing terse, tense, minimal jazz with The Necks. Room40 has once again acted as the needle, lancing that hideous reservoir, allowing its terrifying contents to flow forth, in four new tracks that, together, are called Memory Night.

I call it terrifying, yet as always Chris Abrahams, even at his most ominous is also quite listenable, creating jumbled, but still quite accessible soundscapes. Put together by Chris alone (as far as I can tell), using his collection of no less than eight sets of keys, starting with his trusty piano, then a Hammond Organ, through vintage, knob driven Moog type synths and later analogues, early digital ones right down to a (nearly) up-to-the-minute Nord Stage.

At least as important is the library of samples, I’m sure there are some which aren’t creepy, but I think the best I could say is ‘atmospheric’, in the sense that Picinic At Hanging Rock was atmospheric.

The record commences with Leafer, in which sounds of metal things skitter unnervingly against a background of indistinct bass groans and quiet but still shrill treble whines, before something that sounds like a prepared piano being tortured with a sheet of roofing tin or an iron animal struggling to break free of its enclosure brings the track to a jarring end.

Bell-like electronic sounds begin Bone And Team and - gosh you get to give analogies a good workout trying to describe this music! - what sounds like the unnatural amalgam of a mosquito and a vibrating steel string twitches over sitar and crazed piano. Genuinely unsettling, growling, but pitched noise, scares everything else into silence, goes to sleep for a while and then combines with a mystical synth chord and fades to a razor thin, crystalline finish.

My favourite track is Strange Bright Fact: a speeding electronic beat is festooned with tiny, broken noises, before a slightly metallic breeze, rises to a howl, nearly drowning the skritching and off kilter bass drum strikes. Chris breaks the tension with a jazzy meandering on the piano, before being swept away by the metal gale, which eventually melts into the raucous chattering and shrieks of a Daintree Flying Fox colony. Beat that.

The album closes out in a comparatively modest fashion called Stabilised Ruin, where shattered piano arabesques are accompanied by the sounds of a malfunctioning suction device and robotic bleeps and whirs.

Chris Abrahams makes deeply engaging noise music: taking all sorts of noises and, never resting on his laurels, always making something frenetically, unstoppably interesting. He’s a man who knows the core tenet of both minimalism and noise: don’t be repetitive, don’t be boring, and he never ever is.

- Chris Cobroft.