John Kameel Farah

With Unfolding, Farah concentrates all his diverse energies into one powerful statement. Actually describing what's happening is a hell of a lot more challenging than listening to these waterfall-like cascades of sounds. First and foremost, this is a record about playing keyboards. Though there is a multiplicity of programmed beats, they always work in partnership with baroque, multilayered piano parts. This is a player/composer's album, not a gold-plated, club-engineered rhythm track with a few ambiguous piano chords on top. The beats draw equally from the vocabularies of drum & bass, breakcore and Arabic hand percussion but are arranged in such a way as to be best suited for dancing based on choreography. It's simply impossible to imagine what's going to happen next; Unfolding abandons the traditional tension and release at the core of modern dance music, which can make for exhausting listening. Within a suite-like arrangement of compositions, it is sometimes difficult to tell where songs begin and end. Eleven-minute epic closer "Cataclysm" has several pile driving false endings that represent the furthest extremity of this maximalist work.