Cascading textures, ambient tones and glitcherrific breakcore styled beats find themselves nestled in the dark and damp corners of Duncan Avoid's "Metaphysics" release. For the most parts, releases of this nature rely heavily upon the use sound. Old/new/recycled/made/stolen/ whatever and for the most part they succeed. The beats are great and a lot of the sound design is fantastic which is why I find it all the more frustrating that they depend so heavily on the use of bit-reduction type effects. They're all over the place and at first it's fine but they persist track after track which does nothing but get in the way of the much more original tones and textures buried underneath. Also... I found the dialog samples used in this distracting. There aren't many of them but I don't like to recognize samples... they take me out of "Duncan Avoid" land and push my memories towards a film or tv show or whatever. Point is... I stick on a CD to listen to the disc, not be propelled back into movie memories. If your whole premise revolves around sample placement into collage-like orchestrations ala Negativland, it works fine when it's a constant and integral part of the song. In Duncan Avoid's case... they just get in the way. Now, I've been a little overly negative here and it's mostly out of frustration. I hear a lot of things I like with this release. The songs take their time to evolve and nothing sounds rushed... despite the hectic nature of some of the compositions themselves. The beats and sounds for the most part are fantastic. I for one, however, would like to hear a less bit-dependent Duncan Avoid in the future.