Now as soon as I got this CD, I was pretty damn sure I wasn’t going to like it. You know how sometimes you look at all the details and know that just isn’t for you? I quite enjoy experimental music, but I’ve heard so much crap stuff in the recent past that I’ve become a little jaded with it all. Big, long, wanky pieces of music that just try to do too much, generally made by people who are technically brilliant when it comes to playing their instruments, but just don’t know how to stop – which can be vital in such a genre.

Well Excepter seem a little different and I’m willing to say right now that I quite enjoyed what they have done with their second full-length release, Ka.

Instead of just playing random noises and attempting to fit as many polyrhythmic paradiddles as possible into a cacophony of sickly noise, Excepter manage to work a mixture of drone synths, incorporeal voices and simple static drum machine beats to form some soundscapes that really manage to impress.

Opener Vacation sets the scene for what is to come effectively enough, but the highlight of the record is most definitely the second track Forget Me. All sorts of noises weave in and out of each other until your left sitting there 13 minutes listening to a poppy little keyboard line wondering what the hell just happened.

The beautifully titled Shattered Skull is essentially a vocal drone piece with 2 notes backing up a number of different loose melodies and some rather odd and painful sounding yelling.

Give Me The Cave breaks things up a little with a bit more of a distorted melodic centrepiece that slowly but very surely turns chaotic, making things very interesting.

The tasteful arrangements of each of the soundscapes have their own, unique little charms. One thing I can say though is that they’re all weird, they all sound like aliens conversing about space shuttles and they’re all pretty laid back, hypnotically repetitive pieces.

The only issue I had with this record was the fact that it scared the shit out of me when I was playing it just before 3am one morning in my spooky, empty house. Scary mightn’t be a great selling point for a record but if the music can stir up that emotion then I see that as a good thing.

Look, everyone would have his or her own way of enjoying this record. Nerds can sit down and analyse it, stoners can give stupid interpretations of it that make no sense and if left to play in the background, I think a lot of people, given the right mood and an open mind would object to listening to it.