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The new project of the hard-working Uwe Schmidt - about seventy [!] aliases under which he has published in the last 25 years - is conceptually the closest thing to robotics applied in music: electro-pop finely solipsistic in its deepest essence, eons more visionary and disturbed than the very last gasps produced by the aging original Dusseldorfian automata.

If we also want to make a comparison with the contemporary recent return on disc of the original Man-Machine Karl Bartos, this album sounds decidedly more accomplished and disorienting compared to the vaguely bloated electro-re-proposition of the ex-Man Machine.

Within this new fragmented, chameleonic, sinuously enjoyable agglomerate of icy synthetic sounds in a futurist-Pop key, the manipulator from Frankfurt carefully avoids both electro-nostalgia and the radical-isolationist excesses of many similar productions by focusing his efforts towards a surgical, ultra-aseptic, hyper-multi-faceted surreal/dadaist sonic tableau rich in solutions and rhythmic-melodic interlocks often daring if not completely unusual, capable of subjecting your ramshackle audio system to a real stress-test: when the speakers start to vibrate dangerously due to the strain obtained from the low-frequency blasts of "Riding The Void", you will understand what I mean.

Between a vocoded diatribe against majoritarian imperialist Pop ("Stop (Imperialist Pop)") and a contribution from Warp's own techno-funky Prince James Lidell, it's only left to understand what the archaic rock track "My Generation" of Who-ian memory, literally disfigured by an inextricable heap of sharp fragments and fractalized lapis lazuli, is doing here.

Perhaps this is precisely the prototype of Pop in High Definition that Mr. Schmidt intends.