DJ Spooky

Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, is a brilliant turntablist and producer who combines an autodidact’s love of big words with an autodidact’s tenuous grasp on their accurate use. The good news for us is that he mostly keeps his mouth shut on this glorious, sprawling mess of an album (saving his pompous pronunciamentos for the liner notes, where he name-checks Ovid, Kafka, Berners Lee, Tutuola, Koestler and Grandmaster Flash in the first sentence). The program’s 26 tracks include remixed contributions from such disparate artists as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Carl Craig, State of Bengal (dude!), Future Sound of London and Sonic Youth (DUDE!), and the mixes flow in style from hip-hop to jungle to dub and back again. The end result is a wonderful mishmash of dancehall propulsion and underground avant-gardism—just the thing for anyone who likes them funky beats but considers himself too cool to dance.