Arctic Reviews

There are those in the rock-ist community - the brothers Gallagher for example - who firmly believe that DJ's are largely parasites, artisans making their living off the backs of artists who do all their creativity for them. And thinking straight, it feels like that could be true; certainly most radio spinners these days are cosseted in high tech studios and barely have to push a button. Ninety-nine percent of them have the personality of milk and the same basic motor skills which came the minute we discovered we had posable thumbs. Truly, it's a job we can all do, and it's because of the everyman nature of music that almost all of us have made either a playlist, compilation CD or, going way back to the dawn of time, a compilation tape of our favourite tracks.

Peter Shapiro, writing in Turn The Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco, credits a former model named Tom Moulton with conceiving - and executing - the first ever continuous mix tape in 1972. Working not with a pair of Technics decks and a cross-fader but with razor blades, raw tape and glue, Moulton's first effort lasted just fourty-five minutes whilst taking a mammoth 80 hours to complete. It's not without irony then that for a movement almost everyone perceives to an embarrassment, disco's legacy, not just in creating DJ culture but also by association the twelve inch single, is one which has dominated the last fourty years of western musical culture.

Anyone - young/old/black/white/male/female/christian/jew - who harbours even the vaguest notion that DJ'ing, at least not the kind that involves christmas tree lights and a copy of Livin' On A Prayer, is about talking between the records should immediately purchase Now, Listen. Why? because a mixologist doctrine originally dreamt up by Coldcut turntablists Matt Black and Jonathan More for their early 90's shows on KISS, the DJ Food "Style" is nothing short of revelatory. Working with raw materials grabbed magpie-like from every corner of the musical experience, what resulted was a ceaselessly turning snake of ideas and lunatic creativity. Pieces were spliced together with random samples, stylistic leaps achieved in the flip of a mixer, and when eventually DK - Darren Knott to his mum - joined as producer in 1997, the takeover was as seamless as the drop itself.

Perhaps the reason why Now, Listen is so devastatingly effective is that it takes all the rule breaking aesthetics of Coldcut's legendary Journeys By DJ set and then makes itself more eclectic, more soaked in mood, more break heavy and yet ultimately more accessible. Everything, every seemingly off the wall, crazy brainstormed idea works, to the point where a two minute spoken word segment of Leonard Nemoy narrating a Ray Bradbury short story fits like a Vulcan nerve pinch. Knott, More and Black also refuse to take the easy options, typified in that where lazier brains may have opted for going to Herbie Hancock's Kraftwerk-lifting Rock-It, here instead his 1974 opus Nobu threads straight into Link's Amenity.

By then the odyssey is nearly over, the listener having traversed hip-hop, breaks, drum n' bass, latin funk and stuff which had probably never before found itself on a DJ mix and certainly never has again. The Beat's 1980 ode to paranoid schizophrenia Mirror In The Bathroom showed they'd left the punk/ska simplicity of Two-Tone in another dimension - yet here it sits, along with the theme to sweat and sideburns thriller The Taking of Pelham 123 and something spliced together from a home-instruction drumming course. As sublimely undanceable as they may look on paper, all of these are elemental parts of this excercise, disc jockey shamanism created by people who quite rightly perceive themselves to be artists in their own right.

Critically adored on it's release, surely if indie dullards The Maccabes can re-release their album Wall of Arms later in the same year using the flimsy excuse of five additional tracks, it's possible to argue that Now Listen should be topping polls again this year. On first experience though be prepared; it'll be your jaw, not your feet, which will hit the dancefloor first.