DJ-Kicks

We Say...

Review by Michaelangelo Matos

If over a decade after trip-hop (or downtempo, or blunted beats, or whatever the hell you wanted to call it) was in vogue it can seem a little soft, well, that's because it was. It was escapist music in many ways, from its obvious pothead associations (say hello to Morcheeba) to the fact that it represented a retreat from rap's harder realities in favor of beats and samples that floated freely away from urban music's rougher signifiers.

If a lot of trip-hop was cheesy, few practitioners delighted in that aspect of it quite the way Viennese-DJ production team Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister did. And nowhere did they delight in it more audibly than on their 1996 edition of K7's long-standing run of mixes, DJ-Kicks. Including one of their own tracks beyond the series-obligatory all-original closing track, Kruder & Dorfmeister selected a series of tracks so definitive you might be tempted to call this a rough guide to the field, from the Herbalizer's opening "A Mother (For Your Mind)" to future electro-lounge-funk chieftains Thievery Corporation ("Shaolin Satellite") to "Keep on Believing" by Beanfield, one of the artists from the period whose run was short but sativa-sweet.

What's most surprising about K&D's DJ-Kicks is how heavy it is on drum and bass, which makes up a fair amount of the track list — though "heavy" is about the last word you'd use to describe tracks like Tango's "Spellbound" or JMJ & Flytronix's glassy, elegant "In Too Deep." Forget about the hard breaks/wispy ambience merger producers like L.T.J Bukem had pioneered earlier in the decade; from the bottom up, K&D's selections float on air like so much ganja smoke. And ultimately, that's why this DJ-Kicks endures: it's one of the most sweetly playful mixes of the '90s.