Sax strangler and guitar mauler Elliott Sharp has been raising downtown avant- garde eyebrows since the seventies. He's collaborated with the grand Pooh-Bah of the downtown scene, John Zorn, and probably shared an occasional basket of cheesy fries with fellow guitar terrorist Derek Bailey. So he's connected in all the right places. Of course, he could be a complete toss bag, but I'd hesitate to venture such an opinion on the evidence of this stunning album.

Tectonics is Elliott Sharp's electronica moniker, and for those of you that weren't around for the last record, 1998's Field and Stream, Sharp ripped drum-n-bass a new one by layering dreadnought beats with the tortured skkreeches of his saxophone and the razor shards of modified guitars. The album put all but Photek's releases to shame at the time of its release.

Since then, Sharp has found some new upstarts jockeying for his spot. Autechre, Phoenicia, and Boards of Canada-– all their fine recent releases are reduced to a fine gray dust by Errata. See, Sharp is not only a devilishly accomplished sax and guitar player; he can also program the crunchiest beats and the wildest rhythm sequences.

Just to top off the pissing contest, he's given each track vaguely Boards of Canada-ish titles: "Spliny Thicket," "Goomy," and "Kargyraa," for example. "Spliny Thicket" opens with a tsunami of guitar noise that even Thurston Moore might get out of bed for-- it's probably the most conventional track here. By contrast, the relatively peaceful "Calle Siete" skronks along on a bluesy sax riff before the rippling percussion rolls into an urban gamelan frenzy. "Noospheric" is a bravado display of beating down "idm" spods into the backlit screens of their Powerbooks.

I've not heard an album this year that successfully combines the naked freedom of jazz improvisation and the alien crunch of digital mechanisms with more feistiness and self- confidence. The ol' Warp label may be the brand leader in electronica for now, but the real innovator has been around a whole lot longer than 10 years, and he doesn't need Amazon.com to fawn over him. He calls this record Errata. What a wag!

-Paul Cooper