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Lead Singer Syndrome

DJ Spooky vs Scanner

The Quick and the Dead - 1999

This is the first album in the Meld Series, which wants "to combine a regular series of recordings to explore the union of one artist with another, breaking the mould, dissolving expectations, in the hope of opening up a fresh wound in the sound". This first attempt is a bit of a cheat, since one of the artists being melded is Scanner, who is also the person behind the Meld series and the owner of Sulphur records (where the Meld series is being released). It just seems a little presumptious to start a project that involves taking a bit of this guy and bit of that guy with yourself.

This first attempt is also a bit of a failure.

Certainly not because the music is bad. Far from it. It's a combination of dense layers of noise and electronic sounds, mixed with hip-hop samples and beats. The problem is that that's a fairly good generalization of DJ Spooky's sound, which leaves one wondering what Scanner is doing. I'm not familiar with Scanner, but either his contribution here is so minimal or subtle that he isn't drastically changing Spooky's sound, or he does the same sort of thing that Spooky does. Either way, the melding of the two is not opening up a fresh wound in anything. It's a good place to go for those who have DJ Spooky's albums and want some more of the same, but it's nothing groundbreaking.

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