Album Review: DJ Food – Kaleidoscope Companion


7.5/10

DJ Food Kaleidoscope Companion




It is mandated by a music writer’s law stating whenever you discuss Coldcut – the loose fraternity of DJs, producers and artists which first coalesced in London during the early 1980s – that you mention their 1995 mixtape 70 Minutes Of Madness if only to remind everybody that nearly 30 years later it remains undefeated as the greatest leftfield mashup of all time.

Inspired by groundbreaking releases like The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel, the collective started out with a late-night show called Solid Steel on KISS, then still a pirate station.

From there they went on to develop a wildly eclectic style that soldered pretty much anything to anything and peppered the results with odd spoken-word interludes culled from various eggheaded libraries. In an era when crossfading was for most about as far as it went, they were arcane turntablists, adepts who never took themselves too seriously.

Coldcut enjoyed chart success too, in a number of guises. Meanwhile, the offshoot outlet DJ Food continued with the Jazz Brakes series throughout the 90s, and as the new century turned Kevin Foakes, aka Strictly Kev, and Patrick Carpenter, aka PC, released Kaleidoscope, a more introspective, tune-led collection that stepped away from the freneticism of their roots.

The past though soon disappears over the horizon. In the process recently of compiling the material for a 20th anniversary reissue, the pair were surprised to rediscover numerous prototype versions, alternate mixes and unreleased ideas – tracks, they’ve since said that, ‘should have never been left in a drawer for two decades’.

The result is something labelled awkwardly as a ‘companion’, but while super dedicated obsessives will be able to endlessly compare and contrast, for any toe-dippers it works just as well as a standalone project.

Opener The Ents Go To War begins with brooding retro synths before leaping off into hard breaks and compu-strings, while The Crow (Slow) – one of the few originals directly reclaimed – is transformed into Moby-esque ambience before it then melts into peaceful echoey dub.

One of the most consistent go-to genres for the gang to pillage was always jazz, explorations which explored in particular its relationship with rhythm, the murderous double-bass snaps of A Strange Walk a moody case in point.



This, more than casual affair, ramps up on Stealth, itself a Mad Professorian remix of a remix of a different song, one on which the creeping woodwind and gothic piano wouldn’t sound out of place haunting a house somewhere.

If this was a film it might be Frankenstein, reflecting how the stitching together of different works has been surgically done, but Foakes and Carpenter have way too much experience and skill for you to see the joins; the equally cinematic closer Boohoo spell-weaving without beats and Hip Operation, with its archetypal bonkers lateral monologues and wonderfully clanked out neo-brass each taking the listener on different but the same trips.

Good luck with finding some sort of middle then, but if it’s anywhere Quadraplex (A Trip To The Galactic Centre) would be it. At over thirteen-minutes long there’s no real compunction to stand still, be it branching into Goa trance, pounding snares, tribal drums or haunting post-apocalyptic nightmarescapes. You’re not mistaken by the way – it’s quite a ride.

Now of course isn’t a destination, it’s just a temporary waypoint. Kaleidoscope Companion is these tunes captured, like photos, in one state when tomorrow with a software glitch they might easily become another.

History is getting old and fuzzier all the time. What about that mix, though.

Andy Peterson

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