It’s no big surprise that one of the most singular live-band outfits to embody the increasingly blurred omnigenre tendencies of left-field hip-hop production would land in Madlib’s turf. It’s probably even less surprising that the affiliation resulted in not one but two excellent 2020 releases on Madlib Invasion that elaborated on the Heliocentrics’ global psych-jazz sound, with Telemetric Sounds as the more prickly and unsettled counterpart to the more subtly-insinuated tension of its predecessor Infinity of Now. The titular opener might be the gnarliest thing drummer Malcolm Catto and bassist Jake Ferguson have ever rumbled their way into being, a lumbering caravan of cold-sweating rhythmic tics that gradually shapes itself into a stampede of oscillation-battered beats, all with enough of a “waiting for the hammer to fall” monomania-slash-anxiety undercurrent to keep the sweat flying for 13 ½ minutes. That they can compress a similar dosage of raw-nerve dystopia-building into less than 90 seconds — i.e. the Silver Apples-via-Silver Cycles béton brut jazz of “Rehearsal 24” — reveals that they’re less into indulgence and more into trusting both the listener and the band’s additional musical personnel to extrapolate as they go. The really impressive part is that these are largely fragments and reconstructions of a single freeform jam session, and the resulting pieces still feel more cohesive in their evocations of droning jazz-funk vertigo (“The Opening”) and heatstruck, funereal primitive-metal foreboding (“Left to Our Own Devices”) than most groups could muster in a dozen painstakingly-rehearsed takes.