As his hip-hop contemporary DJ Shadow burst out with all guns blazing on UNKLE's sprawling Psyence Fiction project, Japanese auteur Krush claimed the blunter, more obtuse side of trip-hop as his own on his 1998 solo album, Kakusei. Krush's compositions hark back, in basic structure, to the spun-out jazz of Mo' Wax's Headz compilations, but Kakusei evades such slick comparisons. "Inorganizm", for instance, invites DJ Kensei and DJ Hide--a pair of underground Japanese soundscapers--to tinker with Krush's locked grooves. Swathed in a skittering atonal hum, it's too icy to chill out to and too fearfully sparse to inspire any more than a doped nod. "The Dawn", meanwhile, offers a nod to hip-hop's foreboding constructions, but left rapless, it's lost in Kakusei's enveloping, elaborate abstraction. With more in common with the featureless soundscaping of Autechre or Labradford, Kakusei is a foreboding, and unremittingly difficult listen. This is as defiantly anti-mainstream as hip-hop gets. --Louis Pattison
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