Dog With A Rope

He might be plain old Will Holland to the authorities, but the man known as Quantic has burned his stage name onto the consciousness of those who know their music. Whether trading in funk with his Quantic Soul Orchestra or piecing together a panorama of Latin styles with his Combo Bárbara, his reputation precedes him – a young man who's both respectful and curious, directing affairs but never over-imposing himself on the music.

Flowering Inferno is yet another side project, one that attempts to unite the sounds of his adopted Colombia with those of the nearby Antilles. Drawing from salsa, cumbia, ska, rocksteady and dub (among others), the pan-Caribbean approach never succumbs to homogeneity. Equally, this is no messy collage. There's light, there's shade and there's plenty in between. The whole thing sounds both vital and vintage, the latter helped by analogue anorak Quantic dousing everything in ‘the sonoramic preserves of echo, reverb and delay.’ And he's something of a dab hand with these tools; when he applies them to the salsa ‘Echate Pa'lla’, he recalls the records of another Englishman once exiled in Colombia – Sidestepper's Richard Blair. But Quantic's not treading in anyone's footprints. It's his lightness of touch that makes him so appealing, no more so than on the cutesy ‘Portada Del Mar’.

This is a man who, while extraordinarily prolific (having filed 14 albums over the last ten years under various names), never comes close to spreading himself too thin. And Dog With A Rope is another judiciously constructed addition to his near-spotless body of work thus far.