Franco-Tunisian beat scientist Jean-Pierre Smadja – aka Smadj – is a sort of African Brian Eno, a digital Renaissance Man who is giving Paris’s tired world music scene a much needed boost. His DuOud project with oud (Arab lute) maestro Mehdi Haddab produced one of the most astounding debuts of recent years, the pair deconstructing the instrument’s repertoire in a storm of electronic treatments and psychedelic improvisation.

This solo CD feels at first like a pared-back version of that album, with Smadj’s solo oud thrumming ominously through a sequence of vast sonic chambers. But it quickly develops its own identity, with massive dub-style basslines and programmed oriental percussion building into jams that are visceral and cinematic.

Malian chanteuse Rokia Traore’s ethereally folky tones grace two tracks, while the sampled Kalahari bushman chours on ‘Meeting with the Bushmen’ recalls Eno and David Byrne’s seminal My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Most of the album’s elements have, in fact, been used many times before, but rarely with this degree of style and narrative drive.