Before you continue reading, or do anything for that matter, if you have DJ Spooky's Song's of a Dead Dreamer, please, put on "The Terran Invasion Of Alpha Centauri Year 2794" and bump that shit. Yes, it does have a long and abstract intro, but if you have a decent pair of speakers with good low end response, you will be in a good place.
Anyways...going back in time 30 years, if Lee Scratch Perry were to have picked up his RE-201 Space Echo, but, instead of meeting with incredible Jamaican musicians and running all their instruments through the delay's tape goodness, imagine if he met with Prince Jammy and an eclectic record collection. The result would be damn similar to Song's of a Dead Dreamer (...maybe if they were to have also substituted their trees for some LCD on a few tracks).
Unlike most sample based records from the 90s, this album explores more broken down/fucked-up aspects of the sampling world...like slowing down the play back of a commercial airplane flying overhead and mixing that with a low-fi funk beat, all glued together with some heavy omnipresent vinyl pops. The record also takes elements from the techno world. Like in"Anansi Abstrakt"...Spooky takes a small snippet of a reverberated, multi-panned medolica (I thing that's the instrument) and milks the sample over three tempo changes for about eleven minutes. However, the most bewildering aspect of this record is how Spooky managed to mesh some of the most dark, disturbed and out of touch sounds with some of the most ball-clenching beats ever sampled (check out Grapheme), without losing focus or energy.
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