On their ninth album, Werkbund have peeled back the layers of their evacuated electronics even further – it’s so tonally distinct and cohesive that tracks slip by without noticing, and by the time “Scapa Flow” ends the album, ghostly apparitions are fudging the textures, as though everything’s done in the shadows. That’s probably as good a metaphor as any for the anonymous Werkbund – is it one individual? A collective? Is it Asmus Tietchens (he says not), Uli Rehberg, Felix Kubin, or another German electronics pioneer undercover? What’s certain about Skalpafloi is that it doesn’t make any great leap thematically, with its references to Scapa Flow, a body of water in the Orkney Islands where the wrecks of WWI German fleets could be found; Cava and Hoy, two of the Orkney Islands; and Von der Tann, the first German battlecruiser, which was scuttled at Scapa Flow. But it does feel like the most unmoored Werkbund album, the shivery, slowly pulsing electronics often crumbling before your ears; it’s also both the most aquatic of the Werkbund albums, awash with liquid textures, and the most harrowing.