DJ Food: The Search Engine

Rating: 2.25/5  

The contemporary labor market increasingly demands that workers flaunt their versatility. For a person to stick to one skill, working hard to master it, is no longer a source of pride but rather of shameful narrow-mindedness. The idea of someone spending a lifetime perfecting a trade like, say, carpentry seems old-fashioned and quaint today and the same is true, sadly, in the arts. Rather than striving to be really good at one thing, the tendency of our culture is to push creative types toward being merely competent on a broad scale, which perhaps accounts partly for our disturbing obsession with virtuosity whenever we happen to find it in its pure form. First there were mash-ups, usually combining two substantially different styles of music, but the “mash-up aesthetic” has since become a tool of the artists themselves, rather than merely the people sampling and remixing them. The TV show “Glee,” for instance, has absorbed and normalized this aesthetic, making it as quotidian as karaoke. Numerous cautionary books and articles have already suggested that our technological culture, particularly the internet, has changed our brains, the primary accusation being that we have sacrificed depth of thinking for breadth.

It’s hard not to think of this context when listening to DJ Food’s newest album. Entitled The Search Engine, the album suggests the kind of scattershot meandering that, for most of us, constitutes how we use the internet today. And as with the internet, it’s easy to get sucked into the album’s twists and turns, the album’s eclecticism being the sonic equivalent of constantly reloading a website every minute to check for updates, only to find out that, an hour later, the whole experience has been a largely unsatisfying one. Pushed to maximize versatility, DJ Food enlists a number of guests, including J.G. Thirwell (better known as Foetus) and Matt Johnson of The The. Consequently, a few of the tracks here sound more like proper songs, but they lack anything like a distinct sonic identity. The irony of this constant drive for sheer novelty and diversity is that we tend to cherish most the artists who can definitively imprint their personality on music, and when we have found these artists, we hardly ever want them to change, so in recent years our culture tends to sustain and perpetuate the very eclecticism that we simultaneously scorn and punish. In the same way, we tend to follow many links on the internet merely for the purpose of a brief but novel distraction, only to see what exactly is contained on the other side of that mouse-click. Sample a few 15-second stretches of The Search Engine at random, and you’d probably be forgiven for thinking that you were hearing different artists altogether. We know we’re being distracted, but we can’t figure out what it is we are being distracted from.

Like a lot of sample-based music, The Search Engine suffers from unfair comparisons with DJ Shadow’s landmark Endtroducing…... That album redeemed its aesthetic in two ways: first by seeming utterly sui generis despite all the sounds being lifted from other sources, and second by fitting each track into an overall narrative structure, conveying a sense of flow that owes as much to the conventions of the album as it does to the feeling of movies. DJ Food has a similar fondness for cinematic snatches of text, at times also recalling the work of Boards of Canada, but this seems a mere affectation in the context of an album that is really just, like the internet, an excuse to play around. Without any unifying sense of structure or narrative, The Search Engine is really nothing more than a collection of material, the hour’s worth of musical content generated by a man noodling around in his studio, sometimes with friends. This sounds like an insult, but it doesn’t have to be: considered on a minute-by-minute level, much of The Search Engine is often engaging and almost always well-crafted. But without anything tying it all together, the album is little more than an aimless series of moments. These moments can be enjoyable in themselves, but you sometimes long instead to hear music constructed with the virtues of patience and restraint in mind. In fact, the most enjoyable experience I had with the album was when I accidentally left the track “Intermission: A New Language” on repeat and listened to it for over ten minutes before realizing that it was just a one-minute interlude.

It makes sense that this brief, shimmering piece of music is treated as mere connective tissue for the album, because it couldn’t be more different from the maximalist aesthetic that often plagues sample-based music. Hip hop producers have long realized that samples should be honored, given enough room to breathe without losing their shape. But outside hip hop, peskily neurotic notions of originality drive artists to incorporate as many sonic elements as possible, in an attempt to usurp their source material’s authority. The aforementioned interlude is one of the only moments where DJ Food’s approach quiets down, and of course, it lasts all of a minute. The rest of the album is crammed so full of such diverse elements and frequent changes that one longs, like a Luddite, for something more spacious, simpler but at the same time more organically responsive to the challenges of musical construction posed by a given medium. Rather than listen to an artist like DJ Food, one whose digital toolbox promises limitless possibilities but virtually no formal boundaries, it would be far more enjoyable to do something out-of-step with the times, like watching a pianist who has spent his or her whole life learning the contours of a single instrument. Seemingly quaint and old-fashioned, this preference would instead be something quite radical in these maximalist times.