Turntable jazz

Skratch Pikl DJs Q-Bert and Disk

by Alex Pappademas

DJ Q-Bert (center)

By now, the concept of the turntable jock as guitar hero is old news. Showboating shamelessly, soaking up the crowd's adulation like so much tour-rider Cristal, and (presumably) pulling all the flyest groupies, DJs finally got some props in 1998. For me, the phenomenon's peak moment came last summer when vinyl instrumentalist Mix Master Mike took control of the Beastie Boys. During their North American tour, he bounced them all over the stage; now all they can do on awards shows is sing his theme song ("Three MCs and One DJ") like obedient finger puppets.

Like Mix Master Mike, DJ Q-Bert -- born Richard Quitevis -- is a founding member of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, a San Francisco DJ crew who've gradually morphed into the world's first all-turntable jazz outfit. Sounds on wax aren't fixed things to the Piklz, they're audio Play-Doh. The 1997 posse-cut single "Invisibl Skratch Piklz vs. the Klamz uv Deth" showcased the collective as a fluid, vinyl-molesting Band of the Hand, obsessively carving free-form hip-hop out of anything not nailed down. Solo, Q-Bert has mega-mixed DJ Shadow, assisted Dr. Octagon, and masterminded the newly reissued, crazily revered mix tape Demolition Pumpkin Squeeze Muzik, an inspired drum-break joyride that knocks Rhythm Heritage's "Theme from S.W.A.T." into Ren and Stimpy, Love Unlimited, and Rush's hesher jam "Tom Sawyer."

Without a hands-on understanding of scratching's technical vagaries, it's often hard to tell an inventive DJ from one who's merely skilled, or a skilled DJ from one who's just fast. But among today's turntablists, Q-Bert is Richard Petty on a go-kart track, a standard bearer mixing technical virtuosity with idiosyncratic soul in scribbly, Ornette Coleman-esque solos. His new Wave Twisters Episode 7 Million: Sonic Wars Within the Protons, released on the Piklz' own Galactic Butt Hair imprint, just screams, "Taking it to the (proverbial) next level." It's a bona fide Technics symphony, with Q-Bert mixing cornball dialogue from sci-fi-themed read-along storybooks over stoopid-abstract hip-hop beats in the service of his own operatic vision.

To judge from the liner notes, the story goes something like this: an intergalactic dentist and his friends, "beings who communicate through skratching," battle space pirates and the evil "Lord Ook-Nod-Zeek-Oot" (shades of George Clinton's Sir Nose D'Void-o-Funk!). They're on a quest to educate an alien race in the ancient art of DJing, as demonstrated in the album's three-movement instructional climax, "Grandpa Wears Fat Laces." Q-Bert illustrates the plot with some absurdly onomatopoetic music -- a wah-wah'd guitar becomes a pterodactyl's screech while synthesizers square off in deep-space dogfights. Think Mystery Science Theater 3000 crossed with Rick Wakeman's prog-rock odyssey Journey to the Center of the Earth, with a side of Muhammad Ali Versus Mr. Tooth Decay.

On "Inner Space Dental Commander," a stuttering voice commands, "Say `Ahh,' " and a chorus of voices from Q-Bert's arsenal -- including Cameo's Larry Blackmun -- obediently opens wide. The porno-phonographic "Aphrodisiskratch" is even kinkier, splicing stabs of brass (the Horny Horns, perhaps?) with the moans of an adult-film actress pitch-bent into Chihuahua yelps.

The songs on Wave Twisters can be chin-strokingly "musical," but they're also as engagingly sophomoric as Pedro Bell's old Funkadelic album covers. The sheer wackiness of Q's approach is enough to steer his compositions out of prog-land -- Wave Twisters is a concept album, but it's more like Grandmaster-Flash-meets-the-Residents than Tales from Turntablistic Oceans, a magnum opus with a sense of humor as sick as its beats.

Still not convinced that all DJ albums don't sound the same? Then take the Pepsi Challenge with DJ Disk's Phonosycographdisk: Ancient Termites (Bomb Hip-Hop.) Disk is an honorary Pikl who once competed in a national DJ championship while purportedly peaking on acid; but on his solo debut, he comes off like the frustrated, questing Coltrane to Q-Bert's Ornette. Or maybe he'd rather be Trent Reznor -- "Penguin Burial" is like some forbidding new hip-hop/industrial hybrid, complete with a scratched mechanical whine that could be the possessed speed ironer from Steven King's The Mangler.

The beatless, feedback-ridden "Disk Drisks" sounds like somebody sawing a Space Echo effects box in half. While it's plugged in. Disk never lets you forget you're listening to a man playing machines, burying disembodied voices and flame-trail scratching in a thick electrical haze. If Q-Bert's album dramatizes a goofy-fresh space excursion, Disk simulates its abrupt end -- the sound of your whole record collection getting sucked into a black hole.