Contrast is one of the most effective creative strategies in any art and this engrossing set exploits it to the full. Astute, at times arresting shifts of tempo, meter and texture are what jump out and box the ears on first listening. But further spins of the disc reveal that it is the dramatic changes in character if not energy of the band, either between tracks or within them, which endows the music with impressive depth. Mahanthappa leads valiantly down this road. Since his 2004 set Mother Tongue, he has asserted himself as an alto saxophonist of considerable power, one who pushes his horn towards the weight of a tenor all the while incorporating some of the shrill, piercing quality of the shenai, but the sheer potency of his attack on pieces such as ‘Waiting Is Forbidden’ or ‘Copernicus-19’ is devastating, as is the way he blurs the line between melody and rhythm. This is reinforced by frequent decelerations into half time that acquire a hazy, heady wooziness by way of the liberal pitch bending and easternisation of timbres of David Fiuczynski, who functions practically as a self-contained string section such is the wide range of sounds he produces. It is tempting to label this a ‘fusion’ of sorts but the point is more that the relatively straight groove of funk and rock can cohere with the more uneven yet fluid time and structural complexity of Indian music to result in something that feels universal, and most excitingly, both populist and arthouse. With Gamak, Mahanthappa is developing an electro-acoustic music that is not so much a collision of genres and cultures as a confluence of sounds and sensations in which momentum, the vital hard drive, does not always come from the expected place. Fiuczynski, with his Screaming Headless Torsos punk-jazz pedigree is characteristically pungent but the snarl of Mahanthappa's alto and the snap of Francois Moutin's double bass and Dan Weiss' drums aren't outmuscled. The result is a scintillating 21st century hot four.