ush Records started as a font of leftfield hip hop (cLOUDDEAD, Aesop Rock, Boom Bip), working in tight affiliation with the anticon collective. But over the last year or so, Mush has mutated into a wellspring of what boss Robert Curcio calls "American Made Underground Electronic Music" (see Daedelus and Andre Afram Amsar; oddly, label mates Curse Ov Dialect and Clue To Kalo hail from Australia). Octavius' Audio Noir, however, thrusts Mush farther away from its original template than ever before. Which is not to imply Mush ever had a monolithic aesthetic; it's just that Audio Noir bears precious little hip hop in its DNA. Instead, Octavius dwell in the kind of electronic/post-rock netherzone heard on later works by Massive Attack, Flying Saucer Attack, and Third Eye Foundation.

Four years in the making, Audio Noir is the turbulent brainchild of vocalist/programmer William Marshall (aka Octavius) and beat-maker 4AM. The disc's nine tracks live up to its title; at a time when there's little about which to be optimistic, Audio Noir persuasively captures a mood of impending catastrophe. The album's first track, "Monochrome," fades in with the ominous lethargy of Massive Attack's last two albums, but it tempers that heaviness with David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti's sublimely morose tunefulness (both get a songwriting credit). Giovanni Cruz and Jason Manuel add sea-spray guitars while Marshall's highly processed vocals rage like a more subdued Trent Reznor. This is what late-'80s astral-rock mavericks AR Kane might be doing now if they were still together.

Octavius continue to mine a potent doomsday rock vein on "Vacant/Panic," "Speed Limit," and "Artificial Sparks of the Electrical Stripping." On these tracks, Octavius recall boundary-challenging ensembles like Dalek and Techno Animal. But Octavius earn their serious-as-cancer aura without succumbing to heavy-handed tactics. The group find more power in suggestion than in bludgeoning the listener: check out the way they subtly commingle a sense of dread with uneasy calm to chilling effect on "Momentum/Parisian War Song." It takes rare skill to craft a song that carries paradoxical elements like these. Octavius pull this off again on "Artificial Sparks of the Electrical Stripping," a lumbering rock juggernaut that's at once exotic and familiar, ceremonial and introspective, vaporous and heavy. And it's a brilliant idea to contrast hippo-heavy beats with delicately tolling chimes. The only cut that really falters is "Sudden and Increasingly Strange Behavior," which verges on melodrama, as reverb-drenched vocals buttress post-rock drifting.

I haven't heard Octavius' debut album, Electric Third Rail, but, according to Marshall, Audio Noir is "much more a celebration of our influences" than was the previous work. If that's indeed the case, Audio Noir is the rare full-length that benefits from faithful adherence to the band members' record collections.