Notions of concealment, subterfuge and confusion hang in the fog around Rashad Becker’s third full-length, his first in almost a decade, and first for his newly minted label, Clunk. A labyrinthine, narrative-driven “pseudo musical”, the album is divided into four distinct acts that puncture some of the assumed truths of the information age, using startling, idiosyncratic abstractions to reflect the era’s flustering absurdity.

The first part of the album, titled ‘let the record show’, sketches the end of the information age, as we stumble into an era of mutual corroboration. Fanciful, intense and anxious, these four tracks assemble a dizzy landscape of lopsided, plasticky rhythms and gooey, oddly-tuned electro-acoustic blips and wails. Just as we witnessed on the Berlin-based engineer’s last two albums, Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol I+II, Becker is able to develop uneasy soundscapes that tread a precarious path between the serious and the comical. Never stiflingly sombre, the music oozes through genre and history, refusing to keep its story completely coherent.

‘The currency of an urgent moment’ , the album’s second act, observes this data deluge from four different vantage points, each with the same title (‘zero hour’) in a different language: English, French, German and Arabic. Understanding how both language and place informs our understanding, Becker takes radically different approaches to each track; ‘zero hour’ is dense, overpowering and dramatic, ‘stunde null’ is whimsical and cosmic, and ‘Saatu Alssufri’ ornate, charged and entrenched in traditional musics.

Becker surrenders to the state of amplified apathy during the third act, ‘repercussions’. Described as a “comical exorcism”, the two tracks skewer lacklustre contemporary ritual musics, representing this crisis stage with gummy metallic clangs and ratcheting rhythms that sound as much like a factory floor as a place of worship. And on the generous, side-long final composition, ‘what really happened’, Becker sets the story straight with “a docu-fiction piece by the multitude” that details the whole string of events. Brassy and sinewy, it’s a celebration of Becker’s sculpted sound design techniques that unfolds like a film, smudging sirens into precarious synthetic squeals, drones and urgent blasts of white noise. It wonders what might be happening behind the curtain of news and hearsay, suggesting that the truth might be just as outlandish as its distortions.

‘The Incident’ is congested but permeable, nervous and humorous - its contradictions are the fulcrum it balances on, and it constantly tips one way and another until disorientation is guaranteed.