Brassica’s obsession with sonic detail and fascination with composition have created something self-consciously experimental and intellectual yet wonderfully refined and thrillingly accessible. Seamless, idiosyncratic and immaculately produced yet wilfully lo-fi, the album is rich with musical and lyrical detail and while the originality and non-conformity at play is to be applauded, this album will not scare off anyone with an interest in music beyond the mainstream. Man is Deaf is not exactly a dance album; and although there is music you can dance to on it, it’s ability to excite is accomplished with no diminution on its makers creativity.

With the album full of melody lines by Moog and Fender Rhodes, rather than Roland 303s or 909s, Brassica is more likely to cite paragons like Talking Heads, King Crimson or Return to Forever as inspirations than Derrick May, Cabaret Voltaire or Aphex Twin, yet all these influences and more are cultivated to create something new that still manages to be oddly familiar. It’s in the pathos of the promiscuous liaisons between noirish anxiety, elements that could have been caned by Belgian new beat and Italian Cosmic DJs, naughty MIDI riffs and orchestral moments that this album generates a gripping power of its own.

Brassica’s vocals appear on three tracks; the hope giving and Arthur Russell resembling Tears I Can Afford, the theological questioning in Air esque Psychic Heartburn, and Deplore, a song for Travis Bickle. Guests vocalists include long time collaborator Stuart Warwick, avant garde electronic producer Ghostape and notably Veronica So from celebrated noise/art band Teeth; (who begins her contribution on album opener Be Lost with the line “Everything Not Saved, Will Be Lost”, famously the unintentionally profound quit screen message from a Nintendo console).

Appealingly non-linear Man is Deaf is able to throw you off balance, grabbing your attention with moments that seem alternately unnerving and endearing. Many overt eccentricities hide in this record. A vocoded Italian translation of Slayer’s “Dead Man Skin” in Balo Di Morti. Brian Ferry’s Saxophonist Jorja Renn appears on Be Lost and Psychic Heartburn. Anagrammatic Art Eb Lull Us was written on an old Hammond Organ with a nod towards Mike Oldfield. The Lodger contains the breaths and grunts of a contemporary dance troupe recorded in a collaboration 15 years prior, and the voice of Emile Bojesen (whose little documented collaborations with Brassica as synth punk band Gold Blood) appears on No Apocalypse.