Socially-motivated art can be a tricky proposition. The artist sets up not one but two poles on which to make a mark. It must resonate with the importance of its message (even if it doesn't actually articulate that message) while being compelling independent of polemic. Fail the latter and it's pedantic, the former and it's simply a bore.

I can certainly sympathize (who couldn't) with Helen Mirra's and Ernst Karel's concerns about global deforestation, and I find interesting their efforts to make a sonic analog of the latitude lines along which much of that occurs. The color-coding of those lines to create a musical score of sorts � pairing pairing features of the map to guitars, noise generators, a film projector and silence � is where the explanation begins to exhaust interest.

Fortunately the art picks up the baton. Through the course of airy, varying white noise, the listener is delivered distant chimes, very present acoustic guitar and overtones through the drones. There's a degree of darkness not solely suggested by the album title but (perhaps because the forests aren't entirely gone yet) there's an overriding placidity to this hour of ambience.