Tales of Pangea: Gotrasawala Ensemble

The results of a meeting between Spanish composer and musician Ana Alcaide and Indonesian producer Franki Raden in the city of Samarkand, this album was always going to be original. It features a range of Indonesian instruments as well as Spanish guitar, psalterium (a droning string drum from the Pyrenees) and Alcaide's nyckelharpa, but it's the sweet-sounding but strident voices of the singers from West Java Indonesia that mostly take the lead on the ten tracks.

Strings, wind and percussion provide rhythm in the shape of repetitive, ascending cycles and Alcaide's arrangements skillfully blend Western harmony and melody with the more incantatory elements of Sundanese traditions. At times, there's even a Celtic lilt, modulated and mellowed by the music of a sultrier clime. Few of these tracks are straight songs exactly, but are rather more like sound pictures or experimental exercises, and none the worse for that.