Ask a crate-crawling muso "What kind of music do you listen to?" and you'll probably send him to ground twitching. Ask him for a mixtape and he'll stay up all night creating a set of ten CD-Rs that bounce genres like nobody's business, then badger you one day later with "Did you listen to it?," "How far did you get?," and "What did you like?" Luckily, quirky
pop
nerds
Hot Chip
don't know where you live, which makes this doomed mishmash of everything
The Wire
magazine might write about -- plus a
New Order
track -- worth considering, especially if you're a
fan and would like to look inside their heads. On their volume of
K7
's long-running
DJ Kicks
series, classic
hip-hop
tracks that make snobs sentimental (
Positive K
) rub next to difficult people you should know (
This Heat
), while U.K.
garage
(
Wookie
),
tropicalia
Tom Ze
), and icy
new wave
Grauzone
) all make cameos. Add
Joe Jackson
and
Ray Charles
at the end and you really have something for everyone, which would probably sound amazing in the hands of cut-up, mash-up masters like
Steinski
,
Coldcut
, and
DJ Z-Trip
.
don't aspire to recontextualization or freaking anyone out with their DJ prowess and while the CD is mixed, it only flows in parts and only for so long before an impossible genre jump makes feeling the bump unavoidable. All that said, if you're only aware of half of these artists you've got hours of Internet searching and rewards ahead of you, and
's choices in modern minimal
house
and other fringe
dance
music flavors are fantastic. Including the ridiculously fun
"Jiggle It"
from
Def Jam
teen
Young Leek
deserves a high five and the group's own previously unreleased contribution,
"My Piano,"
is that great combination of beautiful and strange that makes this crew special. In the end they don't come off as unapproachable showoffs and avoid sounding too smart for their own good as much as they possibly could. File this next to
John Peel
's
Fabriclive.07
and all those equally cumbersome and fascinating mixtapes you've been gifted. ~ David Jeffries