4 out of 5

Label: Clone Aqualung Series

Produced by: Drexciya

This is – to borrow my UK friends’ parlance – a banger of an album. Touching on some Drexciya experimentalism, buffered by some Transllusion backbone, Lab Rat XL isn’t exactly the sum of those parts as it is its own whole informed by them: rocketed into the future on the back of some very cool, very electro beats. the album is bookended, to my ears, with some of its most fascinating and original moments: angular, unpredictable stuff, erring more toward Rephlex-y jamz, in Lab Rat 1 and Lab Rat 4. Some moments – Lab Rat 2 sticks out in this regard – wallow in Transllusion’s repetitiveness, though without the relative warmth that comes along with that pseudonym, giving the material a housier edge.

The name used here – Lat Rat XL – and the album title, ‘Mice or Cyborg,’ along with each track name suggesting an additional test, let loose in the maze, are indicative of the album’s feeling: while stripped of the humanity that grounds a lot of Stinson’s work, it’s not faceless, it’s just very purposeful; very on the prowl. While that means some of those Lab Rat excursions are more bountiful than others, as a whole, they’re all in service of sketching out the entire structure of something, and it’s thrilling once you’re hooked on it, trying to get a sense of that Something along with the music.

…Alas, excepting those with players that automatically flip records, or have ripped it into a digital format, taking the Mice or Cyborg journey via the Clone LPs or Clone Aqualung represses is sort of a pain, as the six tracks are spread across 2 12″s, meaning it’s about 8 minutes of music per side (excepting side D, at 10ish minutes). The Clone Aqualung edition sounds fantastic, but I relented to digital for repeat listens because that was a lot of wax flipping for 35 minutes of music.

Essential Stinson? Essential electro? Yes and yes. Like a lot of the artist’s stuff, select tracks are amazing, and select ones are a step or so behind, but listened to as an album, it’s a necessary addition.