DJ Food – The Search Engine

DJ Food has always been a refreshingly nebulous project, with production duties falling to Coldcut, myriad collaborators, and the current helmsman, Strictly Kev. That lack of a central identity perhaps explains the eleven-year gap between 2000’s Kaleidoscope and this distillation of recent EP material. A lot has happened in electronica over that period, but DJ Food remains centred around the intricate, sample-heavy hip-hop blueprint established in the early 90s.

On tracks like Giant, that delicately funky sound, layered with melodic arpeggios, still feels surprisingly fresh. Elsewhere, things are often dominated by abortive rock-inspired attempts to infuse things with an incongruous aggressiveness (see The Illectrik Hoax). Whereas, say, The Bug has found dub and dancehall to provide a fertile basis for similar assaults, in this context they feel clunky. While such experiments typify the admirable open-mindedness that has characterised DJ Food over the years, they misfire too often to hold The Search Engine together.