Various: Rara in Haiti

The curiosity of the week is an album recorded in Port-au-Prince, featuring musicians who literally stop traffic in Haiti with their edgy, rousing and hypnotic dance music. Rara is both a distinctive style, with its roots in Africa's slavery days, and the name give to parades in which crowds dance through the streets following bands, in events that can be political or religious. This is DIY music at its best, with percussion instruments made from bottles, sticks or old car parts; konet horns, made from the flattened tin of food cans, and vaksins, constructed from lengths of bamboo or even plastic water pipes. The result is a furious noise that sounds at times as if football fans were attempting psychedelic marching tunes on vuvuzelas, with lengthy passages of repeated riffs against drumming and chanting vocals. There are similarities with bands in present-day Kinshasa that use homemade instruments to create trance music, and as in the Congo, this is a style that doubtless sounds best live.