The man who once atomized the ether courtesy of his "cracked everyday electronics" in the duo Voice Crack has been far from idle. Header_change is M�slang's second offering for Cut, adding to a back catalog that possesses as great a depth in quality as in quantity. A chameleonic presence on the electroacoustic improv stage, M�slang's something of an agent provocateur, equally at home abusing the parameters of his hard drive or igniting the toxic elements of the atmosphere with those mysterious, cracked electronics. Either way, his devil-may-care approach makes for a time enjoyably spent in front of the monitors, graphic equalizer remote control at the ready.

Header_change, therefore, is a departure of sorts. Here, the voices don't crack so much as dirty up the skyline, wiping away clean the niceties of the stereofield thanks to M�slang's spirited laptop. What arises off the disc surface alternately sounds like swarms of wasps gathering for attack; B52s strafing the scorched earth below; Martian windstorms eroding the cleavage off gorges of millennia-old rock. Then M�slang throws a curve ball and traps your psyche in a sensory deprivation tank with only the sound of residual tuning fork vibrations to keep you company-it's completely unnerving, thankfully for just a three minute, eighteen second duration, or you'd be quickly off your noodle. The three-plus minutes of track six offer emotional rescue from the piece's infinite decay by virtue of its nuclear-parched landscape where resides the moans of dying quasars, no less suffocating an experience, though M�slang sculpts the ensuing 'scape with obvious relish.

By the time the radioactive dust settles during the sputtering gasps and implosive microsonic tics of the final five-minute piece, it's evident that M�slang doesn't seek to model the latest line of designer noiseware. Amidst jetstreams of pulsing discharge, this is the sound of a man who begs to be taken seriously, whose variations of computer concr�te better the staid academic self-indulgences sullying the halls of INA-GRM. The overwrought experience of header_change yields difficult rewards, but they're rewards well-earned.