‘Ah Stop’ is a fifteen minute piece of inspired electronic enjoyment. Whether that enjoyment has anything to contribute to the musical canon can seem to be the question in light of Feather Beds’ previous album.

They have already released said album this year, ‘The Skeletal System‘, which was far more ambitious in the variety of identifiable sounds it makes use of. Ambition doesn’t a good album always make, however.

The first and last tracks on ‘Ah Stop’ – El Padre and Drat – make use of New York based piano-man Brett Crudgington, of Brooms, in a continuity of fuzzy and internally looping jazz-piano, as opposed to the tinkling delicacy of the middle two songs.

Manx and Tongue, the longer of the tracks on this four song EP, have the touch of beauty, with more than a sliver of the chime-imbued sound that endeared Four Tet to so many people.

This portion of the EP sounds like a scored piece of motion; a walk through the city, sound-tracked. In an interview with The Thin Air the man on the Feather Bed, Michael Orange, talked about how he enjoys using found and non-instrumental sounds that can’t be copied.

Is that artistic vanity or sensitivity to the importance of creating something new? On Drat, vocal samples state “Sane people, that’s people who love God,” “Hello, my name is,” “We want to be at the top and we do not the Russians to be ahead of us” and finally “slavery.” Each of these seem to have an ironic outlook on the acceptance of the mundane or ridiculous as truth.

If you want to combine that with the sometimes skewed rhythm exhibited on this EP, or the stuttering and continuously looping attempt to reach a climactic moment, or certain inner-ear problems, then you can see that Michael Orange is someone who is not willing to accept the mundane. His list of influences attest to this as he cites My Bloody Valentine, Tortoise and Oliver Wilde amongst his interests.

And with an artist like Michael Orange, this seems to be important as he is more interested in the exploratory rather than finding his own voice, for the time being anyway. So the fact that he can convert this aversion to the popular into something that is intoxicatingly listenable is extremely admirable.

With album number two coming soon – Orange says he’ll start recording sometime around September or October – it’s exciting to see what direction he will go next.