First off, dox92t let the credits fool you. Mad Professor and dub legend/guru Lee \x93Scratch\x94 Perry are being credited as having been heavily involved with Dubtometry-- a drastic reworking of Optometry, DJ Spooky's 2002 collaboration with NYC jazz wunderkind Matthew Shipp (avaiable on his Thirsty Ear label)-- but if CD inserts can be trusted, their touch was minimal and composite. Their names are attached to only a few of Dubtometry's seventeen cuts, including mere interludes and Perry's own \x93Jungle Soldier\x94; the prominent placement of their monikers on the album cover seems more like a calculated bid for credibility than an accurate representation of the artists and influences on this record, which runs the gamut from traditional dub to polished hip-hop and DJ Krust-flavored drum and bass.
The album is mostly successful in its basic mission: taking jazz-fusion and musiq-concrete source material and putting a ballsy urban spin on it, bringing out the head nodding libido buried deep inside Optometry's somewhat pretentious and consciously stolid-- though still impressive-- experimentation. Many of the remixers on Dubtometry drastically improve the quality of their chosen songs by cleverly augmenting their highly traditional jazz identity: The weak, yawning \x93Parachutes\x94 finds itself revitalized with the addition of lilting flute passages and a striding, solid drum beat, breathing life into the original's academic corpse, while DJ Goo masterfully reworks the loose, bloated \x93Optometry\x94 into a crisp slab of inebriated hip-hop on \x93Bomb Massive\x94, replete with decayed synth bursts and a bassline that tops any of Spooky's upright work, topped off by sublime beatboxing from IsWhat? member Napolean . Goo's take on \x93Ibid, Desmarches, Ibid\x94 is equally successful at injecting fresh beats under the jazz-bop skin, as is the slow Caribbean sleepwalk of Twilight Circus' \x93Variation Cybernetique\x94 remix, which retains the original's gaseous string section. The closer deserves extra props: Animal Crackers' epic, wheels of steel raid on \x93Optometry\x94 is a class clown worth getting detention with, or Charlie Brown packing heat.
The most glaring exceptions are easily spotted. The lesser criminals in Colorform craft a jazzy house rave-up from the rib of \x93Sequentia Absentia\x94 that's obviously lost in the wrong neighborhood at 2AM. J-Live's contribution is the record's nadir, a tepid vocal track that samples a non-descript snippet of \x93Optometry\x94 and builds an equally faceless song; \x93Asphalt (Tome II)\x94 was one of the more feverish moments on Optometry, but in the hands of Negativland it's a disappointment, a looping afterthought that falls flat.
The credit and blame belongs to all the players, not just the notables: Dubtometry's greatest mistake is not presenting its contents as an amoebic whole. Optometry sold itself on the names of its central contributiors, and the remix album suffers from a serious case of conceptual envy. But Dubtometry does bring some much-needed swagger to the table in the house that Miller and Schipp built: the sometimes stuffy compositions found on the original disc get a kick in the ass and some tongue in the ear, and it's just the sort of stimulation that was needed. Everything's a little less inhibited this time around: be sure and check your drinks.
