Ali O’May and Frazer Brown met in early 2018 while performing with their respective bands at an Electronic Music Open Mic (EMOM) gig in Edinburgh. With obvious common interests, further discussions lead a few months later to Ali passing Frazer a USB drive filled with stems recorded directly from Ali’s vast modular system. Across August and September 2019, Frazer used about a dozen of those stems as the foundation for a set of tracks, building them into fully realised pieces across a range of styles from techno, lo-fi, breaks, acid house and ambient. And thus was born the Dohnavúr method – Ali coaxing the raw materials from his modular set up and Frazer working them up instinctively with his encyclopedic knowledge of electronic music into tracks for which the feel, genre and direction is inspired by Ali’s foundational building blocks. It’s a fascinating and unique way of working, but the results are staggeringly good.

“The Flow Across Borders” continues and expands the “Dohnavùr Method” now based upon a whole new set of creations from Ali and shaped into an extraordinarily diverse and thrilling collection by Frazer in his Armadale studio. The approach of following the direction suggested by Ali’s modular stems makes for a kinetic and high-voltage collection unshackled from genre boundaries, but with all tracks united by the duo’s shared sense of purpose. It’s a provocative and direct album which ranges from halcyon ambience to floor shaking techno. One can hear the clockwork precision of Plone in “The Kindness of Others” and the clean meticulousness of peak period Orbital in “Sunk”. A centrepiece of the record is the chilling spoken word social commentary mood piece, “Phlá Doiléir” (Scottish Gaelic for “The Vague Plague”). This is followed by the Eno-esque majesty of album closer “Pass remarkable”. It’s all here to be enjoyed.