AS DENSE AS A RAINFOREST

Mark Biehl knows how to put on a show. This percussion-driven guided musical tour (literally: the colourful accompanying booklet practically gives you a moment-by-moment itinerary) to seven exotic locales is charged with kinetic rhythms and percolating tuned percussion motifs.

Yet it's relaxing (the tempos are quite sedate), like lying under the sun with your headphones on.

Defying trendy Third Worldism, Biehl even includes a wry visit to the French Alps in which archaic French Provincial is amusingly goosed up its rear by Modern Offbeat.

There isn't much depth to this whirlwind tour from Belize to Lima but the surface is as dense as an Amazon rainforest.