DJ Yoda
Fabriclive.39
Inertia


As you'd expect from the man who released the 'How To Cut 'n' Paste' series, this Fabriclive mix is a real grab bag of songs and sound bytes. Yoda plays some of the inclusions pretty straight, while others are chopped, scrambled, filtered or otherwise tampered with.

When Blister In The Sun follows the siren-laden over the top opening salvo, it seems completely incongruous. And though subsequent listens prove bear this out, when the a cappella later surfaces over Tenor Saw's Golden Hen at the end of Skibadee's Tika Toc (for which it is the source material), it somehow makes more sense, though on paper it still looks like it shouldn't work. In this context, Ice Cube's classic Jackin' For Beats, cruising as it does through production from James Brown, EPMD, Zapp and Digital Underground, is a natural inclusion and it's surprising that it hasn't actually been used in mixes more often, while Ghost's It's All Love probably gives The Hilltop Hoods some ideas for their next album with it's sped up soul.

Where this mix succeeds is in taking other artists' tricks and making them work even better, for instance when Yoda takes Jurassic 5's swinging big band turn on Swing Set and segues it perfectly into The Hot 8 Brass Band's stunning version of Sexual Healing, the woozy horns just loose enough to make it really swing.

There are plenty of other surprises along the way and Minnie Ripperton's Loving You has to be one of the more unexpected inclusions, but it works an absolute treat as Marina Gasolina fades out with that impossibly high screech looped over and over, and while some tracks like Push It and Super Sharp Shooter are a bit dated, by the time Lord Kitchener wraps things up with the languid calypso of London Is The Place For Me, Yoda has crafted a diverse mix with some interesting diversions along the way, less an exercise in genre than his love of music, and the manifold ways to mix and match it.

Alexis Buxton-Collins