How Scott Walker would ve made Mathilda if he d lost his voice, had access to a vast film library to scour for samples and was in the mood for gloom-laden breakbeats. Not least in the police force, which didn t get a sympathetic hearing on the record, but also amongst the beat fraternity. It spliced Gotham grime into fractured hip hop, metropolitan dub and cosmopolitan techno. Doily drops a dub depth charge down a manhole and then crouches, ear to the sidewalk, waiting for the muffled explosions to rumble back up to her and merge with the city hustle. DJ Rupture takes a more kinetic approach, scavenging frantically through dumpsters covered in extractor fan silt and back-alley disrepair for sounds which he flings out in a torrent of broken beats and then tramples underfoot.
Criterion sits somewhere between the two.
Still in a part of town you d rather know less about, still ready to fuck shit up but not with his head down the sewer or stuck inside a dustbin. Race Traitor hammers home an obvious message on the back of a heavily veiled break while Honky Tonk Hits takes the same beat down to a community centre just after the medication has been administered. Perhaps I m not paying sufficient attention, but I can t say that I m any more enlightened as to how this relates to the contents of the Italian dictator s cutlery drawer than I was when I started listening to it 6 plays and half an hour ago. I can t say that I m any more enlightened as to the subtleties of John Robb s production techniques either. Monkey Island obliged.