Kitbashing is the physical practice of taking model kits, breaking them apart, and reassembling them into something new. Nothing presented as final is truly complete. Constraint is loosened. Imagination becomes the guiding force. Agency lives in misuse, recombination and refusing to accept that anything is finished.

That logic carries directly into this record. Abadir applies it to the language of online life. Neat, self censoring corporate platforms reduce human experience into segmented slices of time, curated aesthetics and flattened emotion. Here, those fragments are sliced again, pulled further apart, and forced into new relationships. A language emerges that feels close to understanding but never settles, holding up a mirror that feels disturbingly more accurate than the one we are usually offered.

Sometimes a record ends and I have to hit play again to make sure it wasn’t a lucid dream. I did that three times with this one. It felt less like listening to music and more like first contact with an unfamiliar structure, something operating according to its own internal logic. Each replay served as verification, the music pinching my synapses to assure me it was real.

It is a deceptive record. At first it feels incredibly chaotic. Further listens reveal a precise, considered logic. Forms assemble and then pull themselves apart. Rapid fire kicks and clipped synth stabs behave like machines coming online, systems booting and colliding. Sounds grind, scrape, fragment. Voices stretch and distort until they feel semi organic, cyborg remnants pushed far beyond their original function. Everything feels deliberate, engineered, held in tension by design.

What makes Kitbashing so unsettling is the paradox at its core. In a world that steadily erodes attention, this record demands it. You cannot drift. You cannot half listen. Just as your ear finds its footing, the ground moves again. At the same time, it is clear that this music was made with an extraordinary level of focus. Every micro edit, every contraction and expansion of rhythm, every sound design choice feels intentional.

Learning that Kitbashing was conceived as part of an AV performance makes perfect sense. The music feels spatial and environmental, designed to be inhabited rather than followed. I could immediately imagine how powerfully it would function in that setting. There is also an acceptance that such performances exist only briefly, in narrow windows of time. You do not get to see everything. You are not meant to. The album feels like a trace of something larger, a compressed artefact of an experience that resists total capture.

This is not an easy record. It offers no solutions or release, but it feels important. It shows what focused human attention can still do inside systems designed to fracture it. It asks you to listen closely, to stay present, to recognise what is being done to you and how it feels. By no means is this a form of escape or easy listen. It demands full awareness of itself and its source material. A rare and necessary act.

Kitbashing by Abadir