This isn't anything new, of course. Hip-hop has been dependent on AOR samples since year dot; DJs have been challenging the boundaries between original composition and musical decoupage for years; and experimental musicians from Eno to Bjork have often flirted with cut-up techniques to compile music rather than create it from scratch.

Husband and wife team Oh Astro also hail from an experimental background; but in trying to be terribly clever about things, have delivered an album which is horribly flawed in both concept and execution.

The root of the problem lies in how they have handled their sources. The raw material for Champions of Wonder is intriguingly eclectic - Lionel Richie's Hello; Electronic's Get The Message; ELO's Xanadu; various nursery rhymes - you get the picture. But rather than completely deconstructing these songs and re-assembling the pieces to create something new - or simply remixing them - Oh Astro opt for a queasy middle ground. Big, clearly recognisable chunks of the source tunes are ripped out of context, spliced apart, accelerated or decelerated, and laid on top of minimalist breakbeats. The effect is downright ugly and hugely irritating; very much like listening to a skipping CD.

Hello Fuji Boy retains Lionel Richie's cheesy 80s funk/soul backing, adds 21st century bleeps, and butchers the vocal into messy, bleeding chunks. It's almost unlistenable, adding nothing to (dare I say it) an already irrelevant song. Is it supposed to be ironic, hilarious 80s-baiting? Are we supposed to listen to this, or just nod sagely at the concept? Oh hell, why bother?

For Xanadu, Olivia Newton John's voice is metallically maladjusted and randomly sped up and slowed down; with the backing track entirely replaced by electronic pulses. It sounds truly hideous, eliciting nothing of interest from its source and creating nothing worthwhile in processing it. It's as if someone had clamped a Vocoder to the mouth of an elderly drunk in the midst of their tubercular death throes.

Worst of all are the two nursery rhyme interpretations, Lucy Sees The Moon and Robot Love I Love You. The band's small children provide the vocals, which are distorted in much the same way as poor Olivia's. These corners of the album pull off the not-inconsiderable feat of sounding disturbing and insufferably twee at the same time. If, as the nuns tell us, very very bad children do indeed go to hell, this is what they should expect the crèche to sound like.

Only Snow Queen and Journey To The Center sound halfway tolerable, mainly because they're constructed from very short, unrecognisable samples alongside some (fairly predictable) breakbeats and other 90s dance motifs. Mercifully, no tunes were hurt in the making of these tracks.

Perhaps Champions of Wonder could provide an accompaniment to a disorientating art installation; but as a standalone piece of music it's quite insufferable. I'm in reviewer hell. Please make it stop.

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