DJ Spooky: Optometry

An outspoken iconoclast with a voracious appetite for critical theory, DJ Spooky has always teetered beneath a narrative ambition that has outweighed his music. As both a writer and a DJ/producer, Spooky helped formulate dance music's reigning conceptual themes—rhythm viruses, global crossings, historical transpositions—from his beginnings in the early-'90s illbient scene. But while his ideas have played out all around him, his own albums have rated notoriously low in the epochal sweepstakes. Primed these days by a lineup of probing jazz luminaries, Spooky reverses the trend on Optometry, an exercise in electronic-jazz fusion that stays faithful to its premise without being enslaved by it. The newest addition to the Thirsty Ear label's "Blue Series"—an ongoing project meant to showcase jazz as a still-vital art form—Optometry fixes Spooky's electronic ethos to a jazz soundscape that serves as far more than an afterthought. Opening with a dense bang, the first two tracks lurch through muscular bass lines by William Parker and piano figures by Matthew Shipp, who makes an elegantly thunderous sweep across chords that wouldn't sound out of place on a Joe Jackson album. Rounded out by drummer Guillermo E. Brown and saxophonist Joe McPhee, the band provides solid grounding for Spooky's mixology, which takes subtle cues from extant sound clashes without falling into forced fusion. Over the course of 74 minutes, Optometry ranges through dopplerized electro effects, worldly string accents, gamelan samples, and sickly resonant wind-chime meditations that evoke the phase work of neo-classical composer Steve Reich and miniaturized versions of cosmic '60s jazz. A pair of vocal tracks by poet Carl Hancock Rux and rapper Napoleon state Spooky's aims explicitly, but more significant markers lurk in the album's invisible schematics. Spooky has always been known as an ideologue, but with Optometry, he weighs in as a bandleader who knows when to let his vision fall in and out of focus.