With Childs’s concept in mind, each artist who features here is best considered an enigmatic character in his retrofuturist opus. There’s 1210: the thinker, always actively subverting the norm. The producer, animator and sound designer’s penchant for the clinical is perhaps a result of hailing from Rochdale, a boomtown of the Industrial Revolution. There’s also Ninechecker: a meticulous scholar of sound whose musical life is dedicated to systematically honing his dark electro. Also present is Houses of Joy, the yin to Ninechecker’s yang; the sedate set obsessed with the significance of numbers, and a long-time collaborator of Childs. ZC & HOJ peddle dub-inflected darkness, and finally, there’s Zodiac Childs himself, the Professor X of the group of misfits known as the Faction.

In practice, Faction is a V/A EP concerned with repurposing the sounds of rave’s past in the service of electro’s future. Grappling with accelerationism’s fundamentals whilst conceding defeat to the machines, this music isn’t so much a celebration of man and computer’s symbiosis as it is an indication of the power the computer has to take even man’s basest idea to some far-flung outer reach. What results is five tracks of searing, clinical electro and EBM; razor-sharp and coated with chromium, effervescent and sparkling.