The premise is delivered with a straight face: a fungal war has forced humanity into a perpetual Witchhouse rave. The artist behind it describes the record as "the soundtrack to a civilization's slow, rhythmic surrender", and one must admire the nerve of anyone who says such a thing about a collection of tracks made on a Yamaha Seqtrak, a Novation Circuit Tracks and a Roland MC-707. Bitwig Studio and Vital fill in the corners, but the spirit is that of the hardware jam, in which fingers and knobs matter more than screens. The results are grimy, tactile and wonderfully unpolished. Nothing here has been sanded down for the algorithm.

That rawness is the record's chief pleasure. Innocent Darkness came to music-making from the DJ booth, and it shows in the best possible way. These tracks understand what a body on a dancefloor needs: a pulse that arrives and refuses to leave, low-end that seeps rather than punches, and textures that curdle just as the groove threatens to become comfortable. The drums shuffle and stagger like the infected. Synth lines drift in wet and half-formed, as though something were growing on them. It is horror music you could, with a little courage, dance to.

The influences are worn openly and lovingly. Monomorte, White Ring and Witchz, the last two pillars of the Witch House tradition, are all cited, and the first is a close friend of the artist. Their fingerprints are visible in the murk, the slowed and smeared menace, the taste for occult gloom. But this is homage rather than pastiche. Innocent Darkness lacks the studio gloss of the genre's better-funded descendants, and the record is better for it. Where others bury the strangeness under production, here it sits in the open, twitching.

At the centre stands "The Mycelial Call", the track its creator singles out, and the choice is correct. It is the EP's argument in miniature: abstract dread given a heartbeat. Something vast and root-like seems to be signalling beneath the floorboards, and the rhythm is the only sane response. It builds without hurry, tightening its grip by degrees, and by the end the listener has quite forgotten to be afraid. This is the sort of transformation, fear into motion, that the best dark dance music has always traded in, and it is done here with real assurance.

What lingers beyond the sound is the spirit of the enterprise. The artist insists this is a hobby, made for neither fame nor money, in the hope that others might enjoy it. In an industry choked with strategy and self-promotion, such candour is almost startling. The line "damn this was fun to make!" could serve as the EP's epigraph, and the pleasure is audible: in the playful sound design, in the commitment to a ridiculous story, in the refusal to wink at the audience. The joke is only funny because it is played so seriously.

Put on headphones, turn off the lights and let the spores settle. Resistance, as the record politely suggests, is futile, and rather more fun than it sounds.