**1/2 Badawi

THE HERETIC OF ETHER

(Asphodel)

For a producer/DJ who's best known as Dub-tweaker, it's shocking that Badawi doesn't drop a bass line until he's already five tracks and almost 15 minutes into his Asphodel debut. It's even more surprising that he goes the length of the album without unleashing the rattling echo loops, fuzzed-out tones, or frequency freaking that made his albums on the indie dub/punk label ROIR (or his output as half of the illbient duo Sub Dub) such a sweet synthesis of Middle Eastern sounds, downtown dissonance, and dub-reggae aesthetics. The Heretic of Ether is an electronica-exotica fusion in the vein of those ethno-groove explorations from Bill Laswell and Peter Gabriel, though decidedly more tame. The Israeli-born Badawi layers his prodigious percussion chops over a slowly shifting texture of violin, cello, and foreboding atmospherics -- treading an uneasy and unrewarding line between traditional folk and truly experimental music.

-- Michael Endelman