In the midst of "Music for Eight Bamboo Flutes," the second piece on Andrew Raffo Dewar's debut recording, a motorbike can be heard disappearing into the quiet hiss of tropical insect song somewhere in the outskirts of Denpasar. We all love a romantic image of the East, but "Eight Bamboo Flutes" is more than an exotic postcard. The quiet village atmosphere freaks out as overtones collide while Balinese suling loosely negotiate a droning, elongated melody that evaporates into nocturnal humidity. Raffo Dewar is an ethnomusicologist by trade but his music is more than an academic exercise: he has the rare ability to translate his knowledge into something beautiful. The approach has a parallel in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film "Mysterious Object at Noon" where gentle prodding from the director has rural Thai villagers improvising a story about a wheelchair bound boy and his teacher, Dogfahr. Participants are guided by an underlying structure created by the director but freely indulge in idiosyncratic detours.

"Six Lines of Transformation," the first piece on the disc, is a Garden of Forking Paths that winds through outgrowths of melody, saliva, valves and heavy breathing, doubling back only to meet itself in a different guise. "Six Lines" is more firmly rooted in the West and implies the work of Anthony Braxton, while Raffo Dewar's strategy of writing for the instrumentalist over the instrument is understood when our ears are enveloped in a mist of bizarre and individual extended techniques.

Matthew O'Shannessy / Foxy Digitalis