t’s all the same,” my choleric passenger remarked in response to Six Degrees’ newest compilation. After enduring his tirade about how I’d “gone liberal,” “didn’t know good music” and how I was just listening to the music so that I could pick up Middle-Eastern chicks, I said “You just don’t like Arabs.” He acquiesced and we drove on.

Diving headfirst into the world of “ethno-techno” is a strange trip indeed. Always a softie for the child-bearing tongue, my first foray into the genre was through the voice of Arabic-singing chanteuse Natacha Atlas. Like a Middle-Eastern Elizabeth Fraser with a better vocal range (to steal a phrase), Atlas and her work with Transglobal Underground are often cited as the jumping-off point for many other fusion bands. And many of those bands can be found here on Six Degrees’ follow-up to their popular first volume in this Travel series.

Beginning with a simple hip-hop beat by Florian Sérlot, a Frenchman who goes by the name Toires, the opening track entitled “Sanäti” (found on Toires’ full-length collaboration with Natacha Atlas of the same name) fuses dub and Arabic instrumentation with Atlas’ vocals in a way that appeals to the uninitiated and pleases the prepared. Mercan Dede, a Turkish-born, Montreal-based DJ/musician brings his Muslim mysticism to “Nar I Ney,” which features a dazzling array of Eastern percussion, reed flute playing and emotional male Arabic vocals.

The two obvious ambient-Arab-dub tracks, Eastenders’ “Tender,” and Samsara Sound System’s “Gatha” are mesmerizing in their melding of dub with Arabic ambience, but drag a bit long. The meat of the album, however, can be found in the record’s middle. First is multi-instrumentalist Jeff Stott, who is a member of the more new-agey band, Stellamara. On “Funky Nawari” he is joined by “master percussionist” Reda Darwish. Combining his new-age roots with nawari rhythms, the result is spacey-new-age-Arabic dub. Christophe Goze’s contribution, “Ja Vidi” is a danceable blend of Eastern percussion and Western strings which sounds very similar to Khaled‘s “Alech Taadi” (which you many remember hearing from the taxi chase scene in The Fifth Element). “Twin Soul” by Kaya Project (aka Seb Taylor) features the ethereal Arabic vocals of an uncredited female and the closer, “Bedooneh Pashimoni,” is a slice of ambient-fusion that surprisingly features classical piano.

In terms of achieving their goal of presenting the pervasiveness of music from the Near and Middle East and Northern Africa, and its influence on electronic, ambient, dance and dub music, Six Degrees succeeds with Arabian Travels 2. Either as a companion piece to the first, or on its own, everyone can find something in the sixty-five minutes contained within that will catch their fancy.