Quantic
An Announcement To Answer
One wonders if Quantic was hacking DJ Shadow's email this year. Finding out that the pre-eminent turntablist/wizard/found sound extraordinaire was going to mess around with trite vocals and alienating his fanbase must have brought Mr. Will Holland (Quantic's nom-de-plure) almost as much joy as when RJD2 provided dull-ass Keds-style beats behind Aceyalone's moronic nose-dive of an album. After all, without Shadow and RJD2 for competition, this could be the year of the Quantic explosion.
Then again, an explosion of turntablist/wizard/found sound proportion has about as much cultural impact as A & E canceling re-runs of MI-5: it gets a small group of vocal people really excited while failing to make any impact on the ratings of CSI: Miami. (CSI: Miami took over MI-5's spot on the former Law & Order network.) Still, Quantic made a strong showing, and considering the over-the-top derision fired at Shadow, it's nice that somebody who still makes music with samples and records could get love in 2006, otherwise known as the year of Night Ripper. It's also nice for that someone, Will Holland, to be screwing around with samples south of the border (the border of Mexico.) The only stuff that makes it across the shores of Florida since Elian Gonzalez in 2006 was a whole lot more Tom Ze than anybody needed, and an interminable string of Carnivale-style booty music set to late 90's trance. Quantic took what worked--whether it was old school bossa nova or not, than he added new school Japanese flutes: and on top of that, everything that has yet to be re-released by Verve that involves A) Paris and B) Jazz. On top of the top of that, there's only two tracks (the opener and closer) that utilize solely studio mixing. This is new school electronica: live instruments abound (although a considerable amount of the instrumentation is studio musicians) and it's that live instrumentation that pulls the album further into such obscure genre specificity that almost no one ended up paying attention. Hopefully, a little time will remedy that mistake.
-Tucker Stone, 2006
No one, in good conscious, would recommend that you actually pay for DJ Shadow's misstep The Outsider. We will firmly recommend that you remember that Shadow is, after all, only human, and he seems to like his album very much. Take with that what you will.
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