SEVEN SOULS

Conceived as a conceptual tie-in to William Burroughs' novel The Western Lands - arguably his last major creative effort - Material's Seven Souls offers up avant-jazz dub interpretations of Middle Eastern music set against Burroughs reading extracts from the novel.

To use an appropriately Burroughs-esque metaphor, imagine listening to Peter Gabriel's Passion album - another fusion of traditional world music and modern electronics with mild prog sensibilities hailing from the same year - and feeling the first uneasy pangs of cold turkey coming on; that gets across the eerie tone of the album.

Play it on something with decent bass, because though Laswell acts as a multi-instrumentalist here (by now Material was just him and a constellation of guest musicians), he's a bassist at heart and if your setup obscures what he's doing with the bass, you'll miss half the action.