Sometimes an album cover says all you need to know about what’s contained inside in one glance. Gas 0095, the 1995 debut LP of England’s Mat Jarvis (who goes by the moniker Gas – not to be confused with Germany’s Wolfgang Voigt who also trades under the name), features a rare, colourful jellyfish shooting into the unknown dark depths of the sea on its cover. It’s a striking image of beauty, if only because of the pure obscurity of the creature. Where is it going? What else lies at the bottom of the sea?

Gas 0095, re-mastered and re-released this year on Microscopics, is an album that sounds fit to chronicle a documentary of such a peculiar organism. Like the jellyfish in the depths, Jarvis’ music pits high-pitch washes against deep, dark bass to create an aura of complete mystery. After ambient opener Generator, Jarvis bursts out of the blocks with Experiments on Live Electricity, which calls to mind the geometric acid house of 808 State with its pulsing stabs and ethereal buzzing synths. It is a kaleidoscopic 16-minute train ride into the forthcoming post-apocalyptic mayhem where Jarvis fiddles with styles and gimmicks and never truly settles on one in particular.

Microscopic is similarly epic in length but has a subdued feel, relying on a timid, circular key melody floating above all manner of harsh distractions – sirens, liftoff sequences and tubular bells. Jarvis is obviously wary of consumer attention spans as he follows up these two studies in repetition with a series of interludes, the briefest of which, Miniscule, carries the unofficial title of ‘shortest track ever’, at under one second long. Timestretch is another cute experiment, a four-minute track shrunk down to the size of a one second blip which can apparently be resized into its glorious original state (which this reviewer attempted and failed).

The other interludes are less tongue in cheek and provide a conceptual break from the slow-burn space-house of the longer tracks. But it’s on these long tracks where the album shines. Jarvis is a master at turning electronic chaos into sustained ambience. Disparate textures are layered atop each other in a way that neither clashes nor clutters, each contributing to the underwater, aquatic sound palette. Discovery is a shining example of this, AM radio keys resting on cool oscillations resting on whiny synths rounded off by stuttering kick drum. On paper it doesn’t work, but in practice, Jarvis has the technical flair to coalesce these different elements into a neat package.

The folk behind the re-release of Gas 0095 are eager to point out that original pressings of the album now fetch three figures on eBay. It’s an amusing point that someone would be willing to pay USD $460 for such an unassuming flash on the electronic music timeline, but the fact is ultimately irrelevant. What’s more important is that this underappreciated gem can now get the attention that it has deserved after more than a decade of obscurity.