The prodigal son of sci-fi electronica re-enters orbit with an astounding new EP as Kuedo for his newly coined Knives imprint. Arriving almost a decade to the day since his game-changing Vex'd album with Roly Porter, 'Assertion Of A Surrounding Presence' manifests his first major new work since 2011's acclaimed 'Severant' album, and also marks a lucent new pinnacle of sound design/engineering in his field. Accompanied by cameo production roles from erstwhile Vex'd bod, Roly Porter, plus Berlin's Phoebe Kiddo a.k.a Mind:Body:Fitness, and Canada's Egyptrixx, the nexx chapter in his odyssey adopts a cerberus-like perspective, at once looking back to late '90s tech-step and the digitised gamelan designs of Kenji Kawai's Ghost In The Shell soundtrack, whilst also drawing heavily on current Chicago drill and footwork, and, in the process, projecting a vivid, hyperreal vision of what may come. And he's come as close as any to grasping that mercurial concept of "futurism" - whether divining a metaphysical, cybernetic zeitgeist in the vaulted reverb structures of 'Vertical Stack' and the astonishing 'Eyeless Angel Intervention', or recalibrating the mechanics of hypermodern dance music in the T-2000 tekstep momentum of 'Boundary Regulation' and the head-first rush of 'Cellular Perimeter'. When coupled with the hyaline prisms of 'Border State Collapse' and 'Event Tracking Across Populated Terrain', it's hard to deny that this guy really, really should be soundtracking Hollywood blockbusters but, until that time comes (Rupert Parkes, budge up), we've got no problem taking cues from the evocative geometries of Joshua Petherick's artwork to fantasise our own dystopian accompaniment for this incredible EP.