lenty of producers paste petite sounds with the panache shown here by Portable—that’s the micro-sampling revolution. But few have touched the kind of beautifully resonant source material as Abrahams and even fewer could treat the African field recordings with as much respect and irreverence without turning it into some kind of Deep Forest.

Born and raised in an impoverished township outside Cape Town, South Africa, Abrahams got turned onto music by his sister’s getting ready to go out soundtrack of ‘80s soul, hi-life and hip-hop. He soon gravitated to the explosive sound of Chicago house and moved to London in the late nineties, recording for Context, Background, and his own Sud Electronic label.

And his second album under the moniker is portable indeed. Most of the tracks were created on tour: jammed together after shows, in hotel rooms and airports, an apt place for such an international sounding album to grow.

Abrahams applied Sutekh/Akufen style micro-sampling techniques to African field recordings from the sixties, seventies and eighties. He chopped up, reassembled and digitally reworked the source material into an almost unrecognizable collage of sound with equally interesting conceptual and practical results. Solitary drumbeats, conversations, voices and arcane instruments form the elements of a rhythmically irresistible brew.

Leo Fernandez delicately strums his guitar on first track “Ebb and Flow”—his guitar is an important ingredient in the album’s warm melancholy—before a crunchy rhythm unravels into moody reflective house music. A wooden flute trills what sounds like an Eastern melody. Complex rhythms wind up, tighten and loosen and despite the constant overlap of different beats and rhythms, it feels fluid. “Notions of Slow and Fast Are Set At Nought” is a superb track name for these rhythmic experiments. It’s rarely the staid 4/4 of house or the hard assault of techno, though it certainly includes those, but even though the beats are madly syncopated by any assessment, even polyrhythmic, it never feels off-kilter the way that broken beat does. The whole package reminds me of criminally overlooked ‘90s producers Circadian Rhythm.

Version also harks back to a golden age of British electronic music, when acts like the Black Dog reinterpreted Detroit’s techno blueprint with their own ears, crafting something that was obviously descended and yet quite different. Shards of sound poke out everywhere. Sharp blasts of noise or weird groans, classic deep house keys, disembodied vocals, Red Planet digital funk, Detroit high hats and sprawling shakers. Abrahams washes the crystal, resonant drums with noise, growls and glitch without overwhelming the spectrum. When it all comes together, the sounds are just colours on his palette.

“Typhoon” ties all the elements into an expressionist’s cloud—bright splashes and rough scratches, calls, Fernandez’s elegiac guitar, heavy African polyrhythms and an incessantly looped vocal sample. It’s a melancholy opus that drags you into its web, a futuristic, coherent take on African music, which simultaneously injects extra resonance into the sometimes all too forward-focused world of techno.