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Madlib/Peanut Butter Wolf, Time Out Presents the Other Side Los Angeles
Ellen Allien, Time Out Presents the Other Side Berlin

reviewed by dave heaton

It’s an interesting idea: an audio travel guide. Take talented musicians with distinct personalities, and let them show us what the city where they live is all about. Put together a DVD where they can walk us to their favorite places and a CD where they play the songs that remind them of home. A great idea, and maybe it works 100% well in someone’s hands. But these aren’t the hands.

Stick with the CDs and the trip is fascinating, if not especially revealing of the cities themselves. Both Madlib’s Los Angeles mix and Ellen Allien’s Berlin mix do a better job conveying the artist’s personality than the city’s…but maybe putting a city on CD is too much to ask. And when the artists in question are super-talented, eccentric geniuses of their own genres, who cares?

Ellen Allien’s CD is, as you’d expect, pulsating, haunting, minimalist techno, mostly from Berlin. But that’s not all – it opens with David Bowie singing “Heroes” in German (“Heiden”), includes a Wayne County track about Berlin. In a way I suppose it does successfully conjure up the dark alleys and clubs of Berlin. It’s filled with involving, lingering music. Allien’s DVD travel guide does connect to this aspect of the CD at times, with the quite affable and humble Allien showing some of her favorite little galleries and clubs. But it also resembles the worst TV travel show, with the constant background music and the emphasis on buying stuff giving it the demeanor of a commercial more than anything else.

The Los Angeles DVD is the same story, but with even more of a divide between the audio and the video. Here our guide isn’t even the same person. Perhaps Madlib realized how pathetic the end result would be, or maybe he’s just shy, but Stones Throw label head, and superb digger/DJ in his own right, Peanut Butter Wolf doesn’t have enough of a presence on screen to convince us that he cares about this project. He barely convinces me that he’s been to any of these “favorite places” before, that they weren’t just drawn up by a marketing staff or bought as advertisements.

Madlib’s CD, on the other hand, is of course brilliant, though it betrays little of the travel-guide scenario; it’s more like another collection of Madlib playing a bunch of his favorite tracks. It’s as eclectic and heady as you’d expect: free jazz, reggae, futuristic hip-hop and electro melding together in one impressive stew. Jay Dee meets up with Sun Ra, with Freestyle Fellowship, with Steve Grossman, with Madlib himself (multiple personalities intact) and others for one hell of a party. It almost makes this whole weird hybrid of art and commercialism worth your while.

{www.timeout.com}


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