One Man's Weird is Another Man's World by DJ Food

Now exclusively a one-man operation, Ninja audio-visual linchpin Strictly Kev has been a busy man in all facets of the game since DJ Food’s last LP, 2001’s Kaleidoscope. His 09 regeneration is devoted to unravelling the mystery of the loop, his invasive, persuasive layers and brick-by-brick patchworks making for mind-training jazz-funk mazes made out of mettle. 

Stolen Moments is pure Ninja drama, putting samples in all the right places to have you tip-toeing around your speakers and making sure your back story checks out in a whodunit where the permutations, brought out by a gawping piano roll, omnipresent drizzle and rolling thunder, can only be grisly. Herein lies Kev’s grounding for producing forays that only give away an inkling of something being untoward. Looped over and over and over, the same hint of a hunch grows and grows until you’re swatting away invisible fear.

The two-part All Covered in Darkness builds on the lead gleaned from Stolen Moments. Ken Nordine is framed as the sinister storyteller, brandishing thick leather-bound volumes as smoking barrels, with the string-carved funk intuitively creeping and then jumpily running for its life. Dr Rubberfunk is along for the ride on the second segment, repelling the predicted goose chase in another large drum-thudding romper. Attention is preserved by a chasing of electronic flecks maintaining the out of the ordinary stat quo from a different vantage point (they should be there, but they also shouldn’t – that’s the logic), and strings doing their best banshee wail.

On A Trick of the Ear, yet more sinister happenings are afoot with a sub-tropical conjuring of organic witchcraft, with an added zest of Ninja kitsch/opulence, across 13 minutes of subtle funk and jazz licks slowly but surely chasing one another. The key here is an unflappable holding of nerve. The percussion ups itself to borderline flurry, and though you can justifiably describe this as one big loop of busyness too caught up in itself to warrant such a timespan, the strategically positioned dialogue and that ensuing air of something being within touching distance make for the aural equivalent of crop circles – a work of art, even if you’re not sure how it got there. The same applies to Bundy K Brown’s faint yet knowing mix of Tricky Little Ears, fusing what sounds like strained Morse Code wisps and deep searching rhythms into a silhouette of something for those that enjoy being settled by suspicion.

Colours Beyond Colours draws back and forth with piano tingles and orchestral sighs offset against instructional analyses, before child-enchanting whirls flip and fizzle into the air. It’ll certainly make you forget the EP’s opener The Illektrik Hoax. A goading funk thrasher, and in the end bit of a red herring, owns the stage with needle-sharp guitar twangs leaping out with kamikaze independence from the rest of the guitar section, and featuring Natural Self in a script-flipping role of fly-boy vocalist instead of number one skin banger. The track wants to be a pop star in natty get-up, and its geezerness might pull it through. To be honest, this is where the knees-up makes way for DJ Food’s sorcery.