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Warmly beloved by a devoted few, but undeniably an acquired taste too esoteric for mass consumption, the music that Londoner Ben Jacobs makes under the name Max Tundra is dizzyingly dense, labyrinthine, and hyperactive, but at the same time utterly effervescent, sunny, and obsessed with melody. As a child, Jacobs rebelled against his classical piano lessons, preferring to pick out the tunes to television theme songs and commercial jingles, and sometimes using a tape recorder to construct rudimentary re-edits of his playing; meanwhile, he got his first taste of musical performance as a member of his primary school's steel pan ensemble. In his teens he bought himself a Commodore Amiga 500, the most popular home computer model of the late '80s, along with a cheap piece of music-sequencing software -- a geeky perfectionist's ideal alternative to actually being in a band -- and began using it to construct elaborate electronic compositions. Eventually he started shopping his work to labels...