A Whitman's sampler of DJ and hip-hop styles, Riddim Warfare finds DJ

Spooky dropping the illbient tag for a chance to simply get ill.

In the DJ world, Spooky occupies his own spot somewhere between the

art-noise amalgamizer Christian Marclay and the beat archaeologist DJ

Shadow. And depending on one's perspective, Spooky can either come across as the thinking person's DJ, a boundary-crossing seer who reaches your mind first then catches your rump off-guard, or as someone who lacks

turntable skills.

On Riddim Warfare, he is both.

Playing a snaky bass on all 21 tracks, while making room for guest vocals

from Kool Keith (a.k.a. Dr. Octagon), Sir Menelik, members of Organized

Konfusion and Wu-Tang's Killah Priest, and guest guitar from Thurston

Moore and Arto Lindsay, Spooky here shows himself to be, at the very least,

an able ringleader.

The high points are those cuts with guest vocals. Working just off

center stage, Spooky easily holds his own against the rappers. He's clearly

interested in more than simply keeping heads bobbing, filling in enough

ambient noise, world-music fragments and classic clap beats to keep your

ears alive.

On "Object Unknown," Spooky marries a vintage beatbox sound with his own

groovy guitar line, redolent of Check Your Head-era Beastie Boys, while

Kool Keith and Sir Menelik bring the word noise in a tag-team flurry of

'80s allusions (Crockett, "Miami Vice," Max Headroom, etc.) and general

nonsense. It's an impressionistic review of recent pop-culture touchstones

-- and like the subject, it's fun while it lasts but it don't last when

it's done.

Killah Priest haunts "Degree Zero" like the heavy breeze that blows behind

this mid-tempo boaster and ode to a "new way of thinking." The Eastern

musical grace notes open up what might otherwise be a fairly narrow song,

suggesting new ways of appreciating the vague "New World Order" KP speaks

of. And on the title track, Kool Keith machine-guns his way over a frantic

break-beat in an updated and madly uptempo version of dance-hall toasting.

This genre-crossing is DJ Spooky at his best. But without the vocals, when

Spooky flies solo, there is a noticeable drop in energy. Less head-bobbing,

more head-scratching.

Everything about the record smacks of the new, from the suggestively

futuristic language of the song titles to the use of the New World

Symphony, from Spooky's wish, on "Rekonstruction," to "keep it advanced" to

the young girl that can be heard saying, liltingly, "It is the business of

the future to be dangerous."

Spooky, in the end, ain't all that spooky,

but between dialectical transformations, there is certainly enough to focus

the mind on objects unknown.