Bill Laswell & Grandmixer DXT ‎– Aftermathematics Instrumental (Rhythm And Recurrence) [2004; Sub Rosa]

With collaboration extending past the two main artists to a handful of guests on song-writing, engineering, and performance, this album freely mixes the turntablism of DXT(/DST) with Laswell’s instrumental funk. Splashes of weird humor (like a scratched-up baby coo) fuse neatly with the cool beats and vaguely sci-fi song titles (e.g., “Cut Virus”, “Phase Draft”, and “Scratch Code”), resulting in an odd (though faint) air of menace over the not-quite-dub. Despite the assortment of guests, the consistency of the style holds steady through the album’s ten tracks, as the fluctuations of samples, rhythms, and mood flow along with few bumps. There’s quite a bit of character to it, though no words are sung, and it serves as a nice demonstration of capabilities for those unfamiliar with the output of either of the main artists; solid background or foreground music.

Peak A Soul+ – ボクと魔王 [2001; Judius]

The score to the PS2 video game
ボクと魔王 (released outside of Japan as Okage: Shadow King) brought together six composers under the umbrella of the ‘Peak A Soul+’ name, to write cues for the game both individually and in various collaborative configurations. The majority of the music takes on an almost carnivalesque mood, with emulated wind instruments and little blats of brass joining programmed percussion and tambourines, with inventive combinations of odd rhythms helping to foster a proggy sense of the musicians’ immersion in their work.

The pieces representing different villages of the game are given little touches of individuation, like the background whir of gears for “Theme of Madril”, and the assorted dungeons and battle themes are given similarly distinct energies to fit with their contexts. For a score with such a large team of composers behind it, the music generally flows together well, with revisited motifs and retained instrumentation helping to make the jumps from one of the song-writers to the next almost indistinguishable.

At two CDs in length, with alternate versions of a number of cues included directly after their original cuts, it does run rather long, but that also offers some insight into the ideas the composers had for how to approach the same material from different angles. While the presentation might have benefited from some ordering adjustments, the actual content is excellent, and much like the game itself, takes some unorthodox approaches to qualities which have become common-place for the genre.

General Patton vs. The X-Ecutioners – General Patton vs. The X-Ecutioners [2005; Ipecac Recordings]

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.