What do you get if you fuse the speaker-shredding violence of Alec Empire to the lava-lamp ambience of The Orb? A Shocking Hobby, that's what. Speedy J is the pseudonym of Rotterdam-based psycho-ambient producer Jochem Paap, and he's been making convoluted, intelligent, and ever so slightly unhinged techno since the early 1990s. Hardly the hobby that the title suggests, then--but this is by no means your typical dance music by numbers day job, either. A Shocking Hobby approaches the creation of chill ambience from a similarly brutal perspective as Plastikman or the Aphex Twin. While the Twin's results are strictly hit-or-miss, though, Speedy J clearly understands that there's some merit in crafting a consistent album. The beauty of A Shocking Hobby is in the way that it reconciles its disparate styles--see "Ferber Mudd", where Paap mashes together incandescent walls of ambience with twisted, off-beat techno rhythms, or "Manhasset" where highbrow orchestral sounds slowly segue into a sinister, primordial fuzz.--Louis Pattison