Available on: Type LP

Rene Hell is a great name, isn’t it?

It’s one of several natty alter egos of Jeff Witscher, an artist who also records as Abelar Scout, Impregnable, Marble Sky and Secret Abuse.

Witscher has built up an estimable reputation within the US underground thanks to a series of obscure but very strong cassette releases. Like the oft-feted Oneohtrix Point Never and Emeralds, Rene Hell favours lo-fi media but has a sound that, however expansively psychedelic, is actually punchy and pin-sharp – something which really comes across on his new album, Porcelain Opera, which is available on vinyl with a bonus CD, Rogue Camera, courtesy of Type Recordings.

The album is full of bright but baleful synth sequences that are reminiscent of Tortoise circa Millions Now Living Will Never Die, framed with speaker-rupturing drones and spooky, snow-capped melodies that rise and swooningly fall in the vein of Danny Wolfers at his most reflective (see the Phalangius album The Cambridge Library Murders). But there’s menace and motor to Hell’s compositions as well: the mood within each track shifts from utopian to chilling, from bleary-eyed ambience to coked-up Suicide strut, with supernatural ease.

The bonus CD, Rogue Camera, deserves to be thought of as more than that. It’s less arrestingly spacious and minimalist than the main platter, but at times it’s more involving. ‘Baroque Arcade”s submerged, rubbery almost-breakbeats sound like the work of T++ , and ‘Porcelain Hands’ is undulating ambient techno in the vein of Klaus Schulze or Pete Namlook. Individual pieces can seem underwhelming taken in isolation, but there’s a real cumulative effect to hearing them one after the other.

Unlike so many albums from the new wave of synthesizer music, Porcelain Opera engages the emotions, and does so with a confident and distinctive voice. As its title suggests, it’s a winning combination of the fragile and the overblown, and a contemporary genre classic at the very least.

Daniel Feeld