It doesn't sound like a promising recipe: Danish electronica artist
Mikkel Meyer says that the music on his second album for the Statler & Waldorf label was inspired by his grandmother's cookbooks, which date from an era when, reportedly, one had to go to a pharmacy to get flavorings or spices other than salt, pepper, and bacon. But the music ends up being quite a bit more flavorful than one might expect based on its inspiration.
Meyer serves up a varied menu -- each track named after a different Danish dish -- that ranges from startlingly dark hip-hop ("Tunge," featuring the
Shadow Huntaz' Non) to the queasy-cool glitchstep of "Flødebudding." Dubstep and glitchcore seem to be the unifying themes, but they don't confine
Meyer's experimentation by any means. "Ostetærte" bustles and booms with a weird blend of gleeful abandon and muttering foreboding; "Bananasplit" finds guest artist Lufu rapping in Swahili over a pleasantly awkward and deeply broken beat; "Dyreryg" combines glitch-filled dubstep with a stiff reggae backbeat, to brilliant effect. "Jordbækage" ends the program with another strangely wonderful blend of crisply defective electro noises laid like salad over a gloomy bed of grumbling bass and apocalyptic sound effects. If this music be the food of Denmark, play on. ~ Rick Anderson