Cut Chemist, The Audience's Listening

Lucas "Cut Chemist" Macfadden, trip-hop pioneer and former Jurassic 5 DJ, covers a great deal of ground on his solo debut. Between the introductory words - "Start remembering what you hear" - and the final ones - "The record's over" - he gets through a dizzying number of samples and almost as many genres. The slicing and dicing, augmented by his scratching skills, yields the kind of specialist item that isn't normally found on major labels. Though it's not without commercial potential - the Garden, silkily built around an Astrud Gilberto bossa nova snippet, could find a home with those who've sent the Black-Eyed Peas' version of Mas Que Nada into the Top 10; Metrorail thru Space could be a Kraftwerkish summer hit. But the rest, in its cut-and-paste whimsy, is strictly for people who've tracked the so-called "imagineer" since his 1990s collaborations with DJ Shadow.