Album Review: Pleasure Pressure Point by Black Affair

Steve Mason's idiosyncratic musical journey has taken him from the Beta Band's acoustic psychedelia to King Biscuit Time's politicised hip-hop, alternating between bouts of depression and bursts of creativity. His latest project finds him shifting tack again, emerging with a confident blend of Detroit techno, 1980s electro, break-up ruminations and S&M fantasies. Mason's self-confessed "darker side" is spun around - like a record, obviously - by keyboard melodies that could have graced Dead or Alive or Depeche Mode at their peak.

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26 Black Affair, Pleasure, Pressure, Point (V2) 4 stars Given his starring role in outré folk-hop troupe the Beta Band, nothing that Steve Mason does should ever prove surprising. Even by the defunct group's outlandish standards, though, Mason's latest solo guise is endearingly odd. Who else, after all, would dream of welding Tubeway Army to lubricious RB and house and pull it off?Paul Mardles 27 Anne-Sophie Mutter, Bach: Violin Concertos, Gubaidulina: In Tempus Praesens' (Deutsche Grammophon) 5 stars Anne-Sophie Mutter was a violin wunderkind soloing with the Berlin Philharmonic at the age of 13.

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