- Topology’s new record Tortured Remixes kicks off in truly weird fashion with a near atonal take on Queen’s We Will Rock You (here becoming opening cut I am Petrified) , setting, perhaps, the tortured tone for the rest of the record?

Before the tune is even halfway in there’s a Jimi Hendrix quote.

Two Punk Fun is their take on Uptown Funk (anagrams anyone?!), and whilst less like torturing a pop song, it’s still signalling their intent to be irreverent to material that has the love of both the commercial charts and that has been signed off to an extent by the critical world too.

Fantastic Note Coatings is back to making atonal fun of a rock classic, this time I Can’t Get No Satisfaction. The full dynamic range that the Topology Ensemble have at their disposal is being deployed here, from tempo-less breaks with jagged bursts of strings and bleats of horns to blasting cacophony, from whispered hooks to full-bore everyone-sing-a-different-note-as-loud-as-you-can action; and before you know it they’re shifting the chords behind pop & rock’s most memorable melodies in classical theme-and-variations key modulations.

Oh look, and now it’s a samba of Cheap Wine & A 3 Day Growth by Cold Chisel!!

Are they showing off? are they ADHD-level bored?! Do they have a Zappa-reminiscent amount of overload on musical chops AND stylistic restlessness?! The answer to these, and just about any other question you could ask of Topology’s new record is “yes”.

Heartfelt beatless cinematic Beyonce? got it.

A chugging John Zorn jazz-punk take on seminal Brisbane song Stranded with barely audible Dave-Graney-drawled vocals so they can say they paid their dues to the hometown..? Yep.

A re-arrangement of jazz standard A Night in Tunisia with a barely comprehensible altered time-signature to keep the math-jazz kids counting on all their fingers and toes..? Uh-huh.

ABBA mangled by a dyslexic chord-chart..? Mm-hhmmm.

I could go on, but clearly half the fun of this record is spotting the references for yourself, wandering through the half-familiar phrases and rhythms looking for some tiny shred of recognition to unlock the puzzle that each track is. The question is: is there another half to this record? Will I be dropping Queen Bey’s epic orchestral turn to rapt adulation from the dance floor at my nous and panache? Will this be a record for the heads to show their superior musical pedigree? A novelty? A much better lesson in the art of musical adaptation than has ever been taught in a senior-school music classroom before?! Or is this just a chance for an ensemble who have kicked serious goals in the Oz & OS worlds of contemporary classical and art musics to show that they can be cool too?

Oh! And now we’re into a moody cello led take on The Police’s Walking on the Moon. Another end-of-party DJ secret weapon, no doubt? But are they so firmly between worlds here that they won’t connect with listeners from either the pop or neo-classical camps?

I feel like this is going to be seen as an extremely deft exercise in musical showmanship (I’m seeing a new reality TV show concept: Iron Arranger!) but possibly still just an exercise. Fun as it no doubt was to write this, and despite the hearty engineers’ guffaws that surely filled the recording studio -and the yucks you’ll get on the first listen or two- well, only history can truly decide.

And me..? Well, I too had a rollicking good time with this record but I’m also ready and waiting for when Topology get back to the kind of material that made them a name in the first place, that stuff was pretty cool too.

- Kieran Ruffles.