When you name-check David Tudor in your album title, you're setting yourself a rather high bar. Granted, the "acid" in the title turns out to be of a rougher grade than your standard house or trance variety but still, the essential cleanliness of the sound is at odds with Tudor's sublimely rough edges; Tudor was more caustic. The disc arrives with a 12 page essay by Robin Mackay that can charitably be described as overwrought.

Six of the tracks are titled the same as the album, three labeled "ASA" 1-3, and the last simply called, "Ten". The "acid" cuts are very intense in one sense: the electronica flies fast and furious, recorded with hyper-clarity and, when played at sufficient volume, fills the listening space like a horde of insane wasps. Very smooth wasps, though, ultimately. For all the aggressive attack and fractured rhythmic kernels, there's a laboratory feel to the music; Hecker hasn't transcended the software to approach Tudor's power and grace with analog electronics. It's furious all right and sometimes, as on much of the second piece, it generates enough eternal combustion to pique something other than the listener's ear drums but too often there's a sense of thinness, of an elaborately ornate scrim covering not much of anything. Jacking the volume to speaker-threatening levels helps, the sensory overload perhaps compensating for lack of meat.

The "ASA" tracks, each three minutes long, consist of repeated, ultra-high blips, the kind that you as much feel vibrating in your inner ear as hear. All well and good, nothing (chances are) you haven't experienced before.

The "acid" pieces slacken off into the murky and blobby by the sixth go-round, oddly enough coming a tad closer to some renditions of works like Tudor's "Neural Synthesis", though here there's a looseness that verges on shapelessness. Only the final cut, "Ten" manages to nudge itself into a space that's both eerily different and strangely alluring, the alien swirls doing a severe number on one's ears if played at volume.

Overall, though, a disappointment; taking Tudor's name in vain has its cost.