El Guincho – Hiperasia

Album número tres from astro-exotica producer Pablo Díaz-Reixa plays like a radio shuffling through stations. Hiperasia – named after a string of Chinese discount shops in Madrid – is an associative, jazz-like journey, studded with cyber-tropical percussion and autotuned robo-Spanish vocals, and manages to be both brusque and twitchily playful.

A drummer at heart, El Guincho again turns to his fixation with repetition, building each track around their calypso loops and illuminating them with gaudy, fluorescent synth stabs, guided by some closely guarded tempo that’s sometimes difficult to tap into. It’s the capricious teases (Abdi’s eventual ascending melody ends just as it’s peaking, and just try dancing to the title track’s stop-start rhythm) that frustrate most of all, despite being entirely in keeping with the record’s distractible pace.

Less exotic than his sizzling debut Alegranza!, and less outwardly tuneful than Pop Negro (nothing here resembles catchy single Bombay), Hiperasia might be a less accessible album, but it’s Díaz-Reixa at his most experimental and inventive.