Shocking Hobby [Audio CD] Speedy J

In the background of "Balk Acid," the fourth song on Speedy J's fourth album, you can hear a reminder of the music this Rotterdam-based techno producer used to make. A series of gently ambient synth chords deliberately climb their way up and down the scale, evoking the placidity of a savanna at night. The foreground is where the wild things are. Breakbeats scurry about, flame on, flame out. Nasty breakbeats at that: clipped, tuned to pitches that scrape against the ear, distorted almost to the point of absurdity. But unlike the similar experiments of Mike Paradinas or Aphex Twin, they don't move at a frantic junglistic pace. They move ever so slowly, at the blunted tempos gangsta rap favored before Timbaland and the electrofied Dirty South redefined the game. J, a.k.a. Jochem Papp, juggles the formula a bit, emphasizing the ambient here or the industrial there, but the deliberation and painstaking effort that have marked his career (four albums in eight years--and that's not counting the decade he spent DJ'ing and learning his craft before he dropped his debut) is evident throughout. So evident, in fact, that the dance-floor culture that once spawned him most likely no longer knows what to do with his music. But that probably tells us more about dance floors than it does about him. --Jeff Salamon