AMG Review of Remix Collection

Rick Anderson
All Music Guide

Polyglot chanteuse Natacha Atlas has always been open to multiple cultural influences, so a remix collection by producers as varied as Talvin Singh, Youth, and DJ Spooky is a natural. And the results are as good as one would expect: Singh takes Atlas to the Asian underground with a bhangrafied drum'n'bass mix of "Duden" (a track which DJ Spooky deconstructs in a funkier and dubbier manner later in the program), while Banco de Gaia gets clubby on "Yalla Chant" and the Bullitnuts turn "Bastet" into a journey to the center of ambient trip-hop. No one gets funkier than Youth, though, whose mid-tempo arrangement of "Yalla Chant" incorporates found-sound samples, virtuoso scratching, and readings from Hindu cosmology into a chugging, wailing cosmic blowup. For the source material to most of this program, pick up Atlas' solo album Halib and Transglobal Underground's Psychic Karaoke.