DJ Spooky: Modern Mantra : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Ill-bient O.G./theoretician DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid mixes, scratches and edits twenty-eight selections from the NYC-based label Shadow/Instinct's catalog of drum-and-bass, hip-hop, techno, dub and ambient dreamscapes. DJ Krush, Cujo (a.k.a. Amon Tobin), Russell Mills, Aesop Rock, a vintage Moby and others are on the guest list, as the set flows and crests and eventually comes to rest. Ethereal, often wordless female vocals, filtered snippets of conversations, instructional records, spy-movie soundtrack samples, jazzy sax/flute solos, watery eclectic pianos, sliced-n-diced hooks, squiggly guitar figures, white noise and voices that scream and holler and sometimes talk in foreign tongues all ascend to a percolating crescendo in this seventy-four-minute mix tape that tests positive for beat-matches in a high desert laboratory.

DON WALLER
(May 21, 2002)