Mike Patton is almost as much of an anti-hero as the character from which his band Fantomas take their name. Even while he was achieving mainstream success with Faith No More his first band, Mr Bungle, were perfecting genre-hopping fusion working with the likes of John Zorn and David Shea. Since then he has performed guerrilla style collaborations with artists as far apart on the musical spectrum as Bjork, Merzbow and the X-ecutioners. Across all his recordings Patton displays an interest in chaos and randomness, jump cutting styles and sounds like there’s no tomorrow, creating his own Dadaist language out of shrieks, gibbering and yelling. Which brings us to Suspended Animation, the fourth album by Fantomas.

Recorded at the same time as the epic hour long dirge of Delirium Corda, Suspended Animation returns Fantomas to the sounds of their first album; short, dense bursts of extreme hardcore mixed with samples and found sounds and Patton’s patent gibberish. On one level it looks like Patton has been inspired by John Zorn’s soundtrack for the Japanese cartoon, Cynical Hysterie Hour, all cutesy samples and screeching jump cuts but Patton isn’t limited by the necessity to accompany visuals. Consequently he constructs a small supernova of sounds, exploding out in all directions simultaneously. Imagine Carl Stalling played by Slayer high on amphetamines and you’re somewhere close.

Patton’s writing for the band is also more developed and ambitious, he pushes them with more complex arrangements and hair-raising jump cuts. Dave Lombardo (drums) and Buzz Osborne (guitar) are a formidable pair, like an avalanche of chainsaws, and Patton knows exactly when to let them lock in to a killer riff and when to stop them dead, careening off into a mash up of samples and sound effects or a floating moment of ambient drift.

Suspended Animation is presented as 30 tracks, one for each day in April, ranging in length from 30 seconds to around 3 minutes but there’s little sense to be made of them individually. In fact, listening to the disc on random makes as much sense as following the regular track listing. Patton’s organisational logic remains impenetrably obtuse and you might as well give up on trying to understand how it all works. I don’t know how much mileage Patton can get out of this approach (also uses it in a hip hop context, on his collaboration with the X-ecutioners and again with the sample manipulator John Kaada) but it is a welcome tonic to the predictable motions of his more mainstream contemporaries. It’s refreshingly nonsensical, spectacularly harebrained and hilariously energetic. Pretty much the best Fantomas release so far.

Recommended for fans of gibberish, cartoon hardcore and John Zorn