Whenever I bring home a new piece of audio tech, I search for the right recording to road test it with. As excited as I am to own the latest whatever, I’m almost always let down by the first thing I press play on. The music doesn’t so much disappoint as fail to really push the new device.

Since I bought my first car stereo in 1985 – which I excitedly christened with a Maxell copy of Sisters of Mercy’s “Some Kind of Stranger” – I have been looking for the ultimate test recording.

Arovane + Porya Hatami may have just delivered. The duo’s follow-up to last year’s Organism will crawl inside your ears and never let you forget it.

The two artists have interesting back stories. Arovane is based in Berlin. After a nine-year break from recording, he returned with a vengeance in 2013. Since that time, he’s produced a dozen new titles. Porya Hatami is a prominent member of Iran’s lively underground electronic music scene. He describes himself as an experimental electronic sound artist.

While Organism was a fairly straightforward ambient effort, its successor includes electroacoustic and musique concrète elements. That’s not to say there’s anything remotely 20^th century about this terrific new disc. This is the most modern recording we’ve heard since Ariadne’s Stabat Mater.

And there are so many great ideas here. The 56-minute disc consists of 23 pieces. Ranging in length from 50 seconds to over 7 ½ minutes, each one triggers a new set of dark visuals.

The list of techniques employed here reads like a passage from a grad school text book: modular synthesis, granular synthesis, spectral processing, resynthesis and resonator/modal synthesis.

I’ll leave it to you to Google whichever of those strikes your fancy. I’m off to buy a new pair of headphones.

Kevin Press