★★★☆☆

Legendary audio auteur and archaeologist DJ Food rearranges the best bits of an epic EP trilogy to form an album that’s been a long time coming. (Food’s last freely available opus Kaleidoscope was released way back in 2001.) The one-time Coldcut project now down to original member, Kevin “Strictly Kev” Foakes, comes correct with the usual smoothie of samples and passages into the unknown.

The Search Engine provides terms in funk and the fanciful, but what upsets the album’s rhythm is a lack of balance. The rock-star attitudes of “Giant” featuring Matt Johnson and the Natural Self guesting “The Illectrik Hoax” and “Prey,” voiced pretty horrendously by JG Thirlwell, are at odds with the sample sleuthing and wandering roads. These vocal hook-ups simmer down interest, contributing gritty sobriety to a set of measured mind expansions.

The need for vocal input aside, there’s a mismatch of quick trips to the outer limits: “In Orbit Every Monday” and the chaotic “Sentinel” sound like a long-running Indiana Jones expedition. The aptly titled “Magpie Music,” a multi-episode funk scavenge with Food and 2nd Class Citizen wearing vinyl miner’s lamps, and the archetypal Ninja Tune sleaze lounger “A Trick to the Ear” (even in edited form), take up 20 minutes of an hour’s running time by themselves. It’s fine, but not as steady as hoped.
File under: Openmind, The Cinematic Orchestra, Funki Porcini