Material: Hallucination Engine (Axiom/Island)

BE READY to take a passive role listening to this album, unless you're good enough to recognize Vikku Vinayakram playing the ghatam when you hear him. The liner notes simply list a vast number of performers — P-Funk's Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worrell, Middle Easterners Simon Shaheen and Fahim Dandan, Chinese vocalist Liu Sola, William S. Burroughs, etc. — and leave you to guess who is doing what. In my cynical moments, I wonder if all-world fusions of equal parts beauty and inexplicability shouldn't be banished to the nether regions of cable television.