It’s hard to avoid employing every possible synonym for “cosmic” when describing Neil Campbell’s music, and for good reason. His work under the Astral Social Club alias integrates the same space-age synthesizers and lysergic pulses that Tangerine Dream and Cluster did in the early 1970s, and even Campbell’s moniker suggests outer orbit. On Octuplex, Campbell mixes equal parts harmony and discord, obliterating genre distinctions between drone, techno, pop, noise, and jazz in a mutant stew that is both disorienting and exhilarating. It seems like an overwhelming concoction—and it is—but Octuplex fuses its many components masterfully, emerging as Campbell’s most concise, accessible, and comprehensive display yet. A stalwart in the U.K.’s post-punk underground, Campbell laid the groundwork for Octuplex over the past 25 years. He was a member of the influential A Band and the amorphous Vibracathedral Orchestra, and both clamorous bands have left their mark on Campbell’s work, though Astral Social Club has pointed in a different direction since 2004. That’s when Campbell began self-releasing a series of limited-edition CD-Rs that would serve as the source material for his 2006 self-titled debut on Fairfax’s VHF label, forging a fresh, forward-thinking brand of psychedelic music. Astral Social Club’s return to VHF is no less potent; Octuplex’s eight tracks are dense but digestible, unfolding as a cohesive whole. “Caustic Roe” wastes no time plunging the listener into Campbell’s vortex, propelled by a four-on-the-floor groove that climbs to a saturated euphoria, obscured under piles upon piles of piecemeal electronics. Each track pursues its own distinct route to bliss: “Pilgrim Sunburst” builds from a prickly chorus of digital arpeggios, “Mügik Churn” progresses like a cycle in a particle accelerator, and “Radial Hermaphrodite” animates a meditative bed of instrumentation that would fit neatly on a Vibracathedral record.The experiments with maxed-out techno on “Muscle Adductor” and “Hot Toxer” are especially thrilling. Campbell distorts underlying drum machine patterns with swooping synth textures, complicating the repetition of dance music with hyper-psychedelia and disfigured disco. It’s reminiscent of the recent beat deconstructions of Black Dice, but with a bigger appetite—less goofy, more galactic. Octuplex applies a democratic approach to sensory overload, constructing a relentless swarm of tweets, gurgles, and twitters. One could dismiss this kind of thing as pretension, but Campbell has said that his music has “no intellectual point” and strives only to take himself and his listeners to a higher plane. With a record as explosive and transformative as Octuplex, it looks like Campbell has achieved liftoff.