This latest effort from London DJ and Sprawl impresario Douglas Benford may be the first experimental techno album that derives many of its sounds from wooden instruments. That means that along with the obviously computer-generated bleeps and blips, you'll find a variety of knocks and clicks that sound more found and real-world. This is most obvious on tracks like "Stickmusicbreaks", but it also emerges with the pencil on table tapping of "It Can End with a Letter" and the sand-block-esque rasp and vibrating slat sounds of "Robust". It's an odd, interesting and faintly pointless idea, along the lines of baking an organic Twinkie, but it's not enough to enliven or even differentiate this album from its glitchy brethren.

Abstract music, like abstract art, is hard to talk about in words. Either it has internal structure or it doesn't. Either it makes you think or feel or dream or it leaves you cold. By these standards, I'll admit that Enthusiast has a certain amount of architecture to it. It seems to make sense according to its own internal rules. Listening to it, however, had no measurable impact on me. It didn't affect my mood or make me want to move physically. It didn't launch new thoughts or make me see colors. It was there. I was there. There was no real contact between us. Maybe I'm asking for too much, but I found it hard to get a grip on Enthusiast in any meaningful way.