When I listen to Newcastle-born Will Archer’s project Slime, I think about Arca. Not because they sound similar per se, but because they are doing something similar. They are reminding us that even after hundreds of years of musical evolution, there is still new space into which an artist can move. They are providing us a reassurance that is both cosmic and microcosmic: if music is still progressing, then the universe is still progressing, and if the universe is still progressing, then that means we still have some time before we must worry about terrifying theories like heat death or big crunch or false vacuum—we are not there yet. The stakes, here, are high—at least when you think about it in the irrational (but I like to say intuitive) way that I do.

Slime, however, is not moving in the same way that Arca is—that is why they do not sound the same. Arca moves straight forward into the sterile world of glitch. He is a futurist; he has traded in his analog for chrome and is not looking back. Slime has gone in a different direction, a sort of tilting northeast that slinks away furtively from Arca’s due north. Take, for instance, the second track, “Scatter.” There are glints of the future in this song, especially in its mood. Its low-end-heavy bumpy percussive textures evoke that strange, almost ineffable vibe that a lot of forward-thinking electronic music does, a departure from traditional human sentiment toward something that is not necessarily emotionless, but something that does imply that there may be feelings we have not yet learned to articulate through language, feelings that we may not even experience in regular human life, feelings reserved for some other sentient being whose experience we are witnessing externally, understanding it, but not living it.

But the amazing thing about Slime, the thing that I believe sets his music apart from his contemporaries, is that he achieves this uncanny mood through sounds that are entirely organic: saxophone, the human voice, guitar. Even the strange revolving toms sound tactile—you can sense the skin stretched over the body of the drum with each fervid stroke. The very element that gives “Scatter” its inhuman feel, that two-tone energized whistling called Hindewhu, is one that entered Western music through the very study of music as a human invention: Herbie Hancock, after finding an ethnomusicology recording of the Central African pygmies playing a papaya-stem whistle, popularized the sound when he incorporated it into his song “Watermelon Man.”

“I thought all electronic music was evil,” Archer has stated in a Fader interview regarding his early experiences with music, “like it wasn’t real because it was all made on computers.” Although the producer has obviously come around to computers, there is still a hint of that former fear on this album. There are moments, like in the standout track “Sonnet,” where one feels as if Archer is making every attempt to keep progressive music a human product, only allowing technology to interfere as a benevolent and subservient aid to our species. The eerie air of newness on “Sonnet” comes not from the use of computers, but entirely through the tightly-locked harmonic nuances of singer George Maple. The plastic is never the star of the show; we, the people, are always in control. Luckily, on In The Brick House, such an Orwellian reluctance against succumbing to a bleak techno-dystopia has lead to a collection of music that is innovative in more ways than one. Slime is proving that there is not only space to move forward, but that there is space here, where we are now, that we haven’t even used yet.

In The Brick House is out now via Slime’s website.