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In the early 90s, before house had become synonymous with pop, and when the idea of a super-club was still just a glint in an old-Etonian’s eye, many thought that the future of electronic music lay-in the (vaguely) related genres of ambient and intelligent techno. Acts like The Orb & Orbital were headliners at Glastonbury, while The Aphex Twin seemed to be pulling amazingly inventive tunes out of thin air.

In those heady days, The Black Dog were, rightly, seen as pioneers and the tunes on Temple Of Transparent Balls show why. Opener ‘Cost I’ suggests a Vangelis track produced by Lee Scratch Perry whereas ‘4, 7, 8’ displays the kind of deft touches that Orbital produced at their peak. ‘Mango’ blends an addictive melody with a manic (almost broken) beat; ‘Jupiler’ is a full-on club banger, while tracks such as ‘King of Sparta’ and ‘The Crete That Crete Made’ would sit happily in the Best Of compilations of The Orb or Autechre, mixing as they do eccentric drum-beats and hypnotic snatches of alien noises.

In the end of course, all the promise of the early 90s came to little. The music of The Black Dog and their contemporaries such as The Aphex Twin proved too difficult for a mainstream audience; at the same time house music has degenerated, in many cases, into little more than a soundtrack for videos featuring models in bikinis.

Apart from the odd-development, such as the growth of drum & bass, speed garage and grime, it often feels like electronic music hasn’t really moved forward in the last 15 years. In the end, the fact that Temple Of Transparent Balls sounds like it could have been recorded last month rather than in the last century, says as much about the modern music scene as it does about this deservedly revered album.

The Black Dog official site