Calling an EP Some of My Best Friends Are…Electric Sheep immediately suggests Birmingham producer Kai Moa isn’t planning on spending the next twenty minutes behaving normally. That’s probably for the best. Electronic music has enough producers making sensible beats while staring seriously at expensive modular synthesisers.
Released on 28 August 2026, this four-track excursion moves between techno, ambient, industrial noise, IDM and jazz, yet rarely feels like Moa is simply emptying his influences onto the table to prove they’re there.
Opener ≠ What It Is immediately demonstrates why describing Kai Moa with one genre becomes fairly pointless. There’s an industrial backbone underneath proceedings, but ideas continually escape from it. Electronic textures collide with rhythmic experimentation before Moa unleashes a furious drum samples.
The drums don’t merely decorate the track; they temporarily wrestle control away from the electronics. That tension between programmed precision and human chaos is one of the EP’s strongest ideas.
(Sea) changes the temperature considerably. Ambient depth comes forward and suddenly all that aggression has room around it. Moa clearly understands texture: sounds aren’t simply stacked because they’re interesting individually. There’s consideration given to how they interact, disappear and make room for whatever strange object is approaching next.
It remains immersive without becoming ambient wallpaper. Experimental producers can occasionally confuse atmosphere with inactivity, but Moa keeps enough detail shifting underneath the surface to reward proper attention.
L = ∅ pushes further into the EP’s IDM tendencies and is arguably where the project’s personality becomes clearest. Rhythms twitch rather than march, electronic elements seem deliberately imperfect and the industrial influence becomes less about brute force than the manipulation of texture.
There is, however, a point where Moa’s enormous sonic palette works against him. Having techno, jazz, ambient, IDM and industrial music available doesn’t mean every interesting idea needs to survive the final edit. There are moments where removing an element could actually make the remaining ones feel stranger and more powerful.
Experimental music still needs discipline. When you’re deliberately abandoning conventional structures, arguably it needs even more.
By 0%, the architecture of the record becomes clearer. What initially feels like stylistic restlessness starts looking deliberate. Moa isn’t jumping between genres because he can’t decide what he wants to be; he’s interested in the points where they overlap — machinery meeting improvisation, ambience colliding with percussion and beautiful sounds being interrupted by abrasive ones.
That’s where his strongest identity currently lies.
As a closer, though, 0% could perhaps make a more definitive final statement. After an EP that’s spent its running time challenging expectations, there’s an opportunity to make the ending genuinely unsettling. Strip something important away, overwhelm an established motif, leave something deliberately unresolved — anything that makes the final seconds feel like the inevitable destination of the preceding experimentation rather than simply its conclusion.
The bigger compliment is that Some of My Best Friends Are…Electric Sheep doesn’t feel like somebody assembling a portfolio of production techniques. There is a developing identity underneath all the experimentation. You can hear Moa’s fascination with sound itself — not merely melody or rhythm, but what happens when completely different sonic materials are forced to coexist.
Birmingham isn’t exactly a bad place from which to explore the relationship between machines and music, either. There’s something fitting about these industrial textures emerging from a city whose musical history has repeatedly found interesting ways of turning noise into something expressive.
Moa’s next challenge is deciding which parts of this increasingly distinctive language matter most. There are moments that could be tightened and others that deserve pushing much further, while occasionally the sheer abundance of ideas threatens to become more interesting than the songs carrying them.
Across four tracks, Some of My Best Friends Are…Electric Sheep moves through techno, ambient, industrial music, jazz and IDM without becoming beholden to any of them. It’s strange, restless and occasionally abrasive, but beneath the experimentation there’s enough personality emerging to suggest Kai Moa isn’t merely searching for unusual sounds anymore.
FOLLOW HIM HERE
ALL THE LATEST TRENDING RGM NEWS HERE