VISIT: Birdy Nam Nam BUY: Birdy Nam Nam READ MORE, HURT LESS: Wax Tailor: Tales of Forgotten Melodies

[by Andy Hermann]

France's Birdy Nam Nam certainly aren't the first bunch of DJs to explore the possibilities of the turntable as a compositional instrument. But on their debut album, they push the idea farther than anyone has before. Yes, most of the sounds on Birdy Nam Nam were produced by four DJs using old vinyl, mixers, and Technics 1200's, but you'd hardly know it to listen to the final result.

Instead of the head-nodding beat jams, quirky spoken-word samples, and wicky-wicky scratch fests we're used to hearing from the likes of Kid Koala, Z-Trip and Q-Bert, Birdy Nam Nam give us sophisticated sound collages more akin to DJ Shadow territory. And yes, they can do it live, as the concert videos on a bonus DVD make clear.

Obviously, much of anyone's immediate response Birdy Nam Nam depends on a certain gee-whiz factor -- all of this is coming from turntables? Amazing! But even once that wears off, there's still a lot to enjoy here. The collective's four members -- Crazy B, DJ Pone, DJ Need and Lil Mike -- have tastes that encompass everything from old school funk and soul to "nu-skool" breaks, IDM and even hints of drum 'n' bass, and it's fun to hear them pushing their cutting and looping techniques in different directions, sometimes within the same track. But the turf they really make their own is a spacey offshoot of acid jazz that gives them room to freely mix and match sounds, beats, and looped, chopped and heavily processed instrumental hooks.

It's probably no coincidence that the album's two best, most fully developed tracks in this style are also the ones that come closest to the six-minute mark allotted in international group DJ competitions -- both "Jazz It at Home" and "Abbesses" are not only brilliantly realized and astonishingly intricate, but also downright funky. This is experimental music you can actually dance to.

Elsewhere, the album suffers a little from feeling overstuffed. You get the feeling that all four DJs were all eager to show off their favorite tricks, even the half-formed ones, and many of the disc's best moments are frustratingly brief -- the glitchy outro to "Too Much Skunk," the lurching, dubby "We Drummin'." Still, there are too many sublime moments on Birdy Birdy Nam to write off the "band of DJs" approach as a mere gimmick. These four Frenchmen are dead serious in their attempt to push turntablism to a whole new level of artistry, one that's less about traditional hip-hop or flashy scratching and more purely about the wax spinner's now time-honored techniques for reconstituting old sounds into gorgeous, groovy new ones.

In those terms, Birdy Nam Nam is a landmark achievement that raises the bar for forward-thinking DJs everywhere.

August 16, 2006