The nature of DJ Food’s shapeshifting, awkward inception has always managed to fit perfectly with the music’s often disorienting whirl of breakbeat trickery, schizophrenic dynamics and soft, jazzy cadence, and his latest EP is no exception. The Shape Of Things That Hum is a particularly ethereal beast though, less drifting out to ensnare than creating a humid jungle of sound within which to get hopelessly lost. It seems a fairly appropriate analogy, as it’s often difficult to entirely keep track of the music’s trajectory, forcing a listener to switch off and become subsumed in ‘Extract From Stolen Moments’’ maze of vocal samples.
‘Sentinel (Shadow Guard)’ opens with an ominous rattle of plucked strings and fragile electronic shards, before exploding to life in a full spectrum of elastic bass, death-rattle percussion and industrial churning. If all this sounds off-puttingly foreboding, it is – mixed by Ninja Tune’s master of the macabre King Cannibal, its effect is a like riding a pan-African ghost train, blending voodoo ritualism with a restlessly propulsive rhythm section to dizzying effect. An entirely unexpected but very welcome cover of The The’s ‘Giant’ traces similar lines, resurrecting the spectre of Fela Kuti’s drawn-out jams and making explicit the latent African influences in Matt Johnson’s seminal Soul Mining album.
The only real respite from introspection comes with the muted brass blasts and swing-beat of ‘To Brother John With L.O.V.E’. There’s still a little In A Silent Way in here, to be sure, but the track’s short, sketch-like runtime and jittery voices are too upbeat and engaging to be a total head-trip. Which is a pretty good description of this EP as a whole really, its entirety landing somewhere within that odd region where brain ends and body begins. An exercise in mind motion, perhaps.
By Rory Gibb
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