Stef Animal (The Golden Awesome) presents her debut solo release. Each track was made using a different piece of obsolete or unfashionable music equipment, and the result is a collection of lo-fi epic miniatures. Even if you didn't grow up with Atari video games and have no idea either what Acorn and Commodore computers are or what acronyms like PCM and MIDI stand for, you'll still appreciate Top Gear's intricate universe of sound, full of adventure, wonder, human emotion and melancholic heft. Yet there's playfulness here too, and not just in the title. An electronic duck caller is hacked to produce one track and elsewhere children's Casio keyboards and entry-level MIDI synth modules deliver darkly sophisticated, progressively experimental dream-pop mini-symphonies
