The Insect Musicians is one of those records that makes you wonder where music actually begins.

Released in 1986, Graeme Revell built the album from recordings of insects — cicadas, crickets, bees, wasps, flies, moths, beetles and assorted other tiny creatures — sampled, manipulated and transformed using the then cutting-edge Fairlight CMI.

The result is wonderfully peculiar.

Clicks, drones, pulses, buzzes and tiny percussive noises emerge from the undergrowth and become something hovering between field recording, electronic music and sound experiment.

Listen closely and the distinction between musician and insect starts becoming rather meaningless.

That’s what I love about it.

Nature fed through circuitry and handed back slightly rearranged.

Forty years later, The Insect Musicians still sounds strange, alive and faintly otherworldly — less like something composed than something discovered.