Operating in pretty much the same style he would use to define his Jahtari netlabel, Disrupt fills this EP with dub rendered in chiptune, with echoing bloops and skewed beeps rolling around slow-moving rhythms. A few treated samples are pulled in for extra effect, like the title of “Grave Robbers from Outer Space”, but the wide majority of it is instrumental. Some loose endings are the lowest point, with music just trailing off into dissipation, but apart from that, the EP serves up some enjoyable spaciness.
In this one-off collaboration between Mike Patton and turntablist crew The X-Ecutioners, the two forces collide in a storm of beats, samples, energized vocals, and lengthy track titles. Patton’s singing rolls from low growls up through casual delivery and into hyper howling, while names like “Precision Guided Needle-Dropping And Larynx Munitions (Pgndlm)” and “L.O.L.–!Loser On Line! (Hate The Player, Hate The Game)” mesh militaristic, musical, and computer imagery to match the songs’ flavors.
Pulling vocal samples from war films, Dolemite, kung-fu fights, and other sources, while scrambling together too many musical slices to ID, the X-Ecutioners come off as doing the heavy lifting by a wide margin, and infuse the album with a broad range of flavors in the process. While modernized electro and alternative hip-hop are the most common factors, dance, funk, breakbeat, illbient, and assorted other tastes get dropped in, even if for only a few seconds a go, making the 23-track song-list easy to tolerate, particularly with most of them running less than two minutes. Fun and creative, and just long enough to feel like the team-up touched on everything needed.
Twenty tracks of off-beat techno pack this label sampler, with chill vocals, dribbled beats, stiff clicks, and melting synths drifting together. Bits of chipbreak, acid house, electro, and other flavors bubble up from the dozen or so contributing acts, and while the tempos and action occasionally become frenzied, the music rarely loses its sense of controlled cool. That also helps bind the diverse tracks together across their range of fluctuations and stutters, building a sense of the label’s style on the whole (extensive sampling of Kid Rock associate Joe C. in Housemeister’s “Do You Wanna Funk” aside).
One of the strongest points in the compilation’s favor, though, is the openness the musicians show to bringing in single points of divergence to the rest of the song’s shaping, like the injection of Mediterranean strings into electro, or post-punk bass lick loops combed into house rhythms. Though few of the featured artists have stuck with the label to the current day (with owner Ellen Allien’s plentiful output being the prime exception), the general attitude of the music gives a clear sense of how BPitch Control presented themselves at the time, even with the quick turn-about offered by the musical switch-ups.
Scrambled Brains 