The three members of leftfield hip-hop crew Shadowhuntaz live in Chicago, Atlanta and Los Angeles and record by sending files across the internet, which must take the fun out of creative disagreements - refusing to answer an email isn't quite the same as storming out of a studio. It also makes for a rather cold and cerebral brand of hip-hop.

Signed to the erstwhile home of Boards of Canada and Autechre, Shadowhuntaz are on rap's brainiac fringe, emitting beats and rhymes as dense and intricate as streams of computer code. They've got the outlandish intelligence of Dr Octagon but not his surreal wit, which makes Corrupt Data riveting in small doses and oppressive in large ones. There's only so many lines like "smacking Copernicus with a Stradavarius" anyone can take without wanting to smack Shadowhuntaz with a Stradavarius.

Like one of those fiendishly brainy but hopelessly overwritten 1,000-page American novels, it's best taken a chapter at a time.