From watching "The Full Monty" you'd never realize that Sheffield is a white- hot crucible of electronic and industrial music innovation. Sheffield's bleep and bass pioneers, Cabaret Voltaire, still have their Western Works studio there, and in their wake have come the Human League, Heaven 17, LFO, Rubber Johnny and the Warp roster, Def Leppard, and now SND.

Rejecting the Human League model, Mark Fell and Matt Steel have chosen Mille Plateaux label mates Oval and Microstoria as their design strategy to such an extent that the SND moniker not only references the file extension for digital sound extensions, but also the second Microstoria album. However, Fell and Steel have adapted that digitally- enhanced white- noise schematic, or cleansed it, to produce what Fell recently refered to as "neat and tidy" music in a recent issue of the Wire. If this is the case, the clubs that'd play Makesndcassette would definitely be candy raver- free and very exciting to attend. You'd probably not get a great deal of dancing done, but you'd almost definitely leave the building with altered perceptions.

Makesndcassette is emaciated house music for radiowave propagation experts. If the electromagnetic and computational mathematics department of University of Illinois ever held a club night, this would be the disc the eggheads would oscillate to. But those of you who can't differentiate a Maxwell equation from Green's dyadic can still enjoy the ascetic groove that SND execute.

Unburdened by titles, SND's tracks merge into each other. However, Makesndcassette is best appreciated in its entirety. This is art music and you're expected to pay attention to pulses morphing into shallow waves. As such, at low volumes it makes for excellent furniture music. And like the transformative effect of Eno's Music for Airports, Makesndcassette will make an art space of your own living room. Not bad for two lads from a grimy former steel town where unemployment is the only growth area.

-Paul Cooper