Founder of the Detroit Festival of Electronic Music and formerly the mack daddy of techno, Carl Craig, has answered the siren call of inevitability and has released a mix album on Shadow As longtime readers of Pitchfork will recognize, we're only too happy to pour scorn on sad-sack labels, and few have had sad-sackier pasts than Shadow. Actually, Cleopatra have long worn the sad-sack crown, but Vitamin's foisting of The Electronic Tribute to Radiohead rivals even that label's madcap ventures into digitally stored effluent. These stultifying acts of barbarism have pushed Shadow well into the sphere of the acceptable.

As does Carl Craig's mix album. Despite the apparent handicap of having the Shadow roster to pull from, Craig makes Onsumothasheeat an enjoyable study in future funk and electro-jazz. Sometimes we don't even notice that he's dropping in some of his own label's material. The Shadow tracks he mixes showcase the adventurous A&R; policy the label has been adhering to. Indeed, the reason for Shadow's recent sweet perfume is their willingness to license underground tunes from boutique labels. Chief amongst these is Jamie Odell's Freerange label, a compilation of which Shadow recently released under the title Scrambled.

Craig takes a couple of scoops from the Freerange catalog, beginning Onsumothasheeat with "Wild Light" by Jamie Odell's alter ego, Jimpster. Between LB's (aka Atom Heart) datacore versions of James Brown's "Superbad" and Prince's "The Future," Craig slides the psychedelic soul-jazz of Marasma's "I Have Got Garlic Hanging on My Front Door" and Goo's giddy deck-cutting "The O.G." Craig's sequencing skills and innate musicality ensure that what sounds jarring on paper flows more plausibly than an Internet gay porn rumor about Tom Cruise.

The second half of Onsumothasheeat takes a beatfreakier route-- Reginald Craig's "Second Wind" is jacking techno hijacked by instrumentally violent daycare infants, whose frenzy slips into the cello-baiting and vibes-thrashing Japanese jazz of Shinju Gumi's "Hide and Seek." Then follows the definitive Detroit dub'n'drum'n'bass'n'Joe Zainwul jazz concoction, "Landscaping" (it's tougher than Craig's own "Bug in the Bassbin"). The track lulls us with its subdued skronk until the pills kick in and we're careening around, our synapses zapped in a battery of rimshots, echoed sub-bass, and flashbacking vibes washes.

Nothing could follow "Landscaping," but Shadow's flat-footed Droid sure try. Their contribution, "Poly Bell," was snipped from their NYC D-N-B album. The juxtaposition confirms what I already knew from subjecting myself to their record: Droid's Hot Pockets variant on Jon Hassell's treated trumpet and Grooverider's beats plain sucks! Hey! I don't care if the sweeping ambitronics and pedestrian I-think-this-is-what-a-Robbie Shakespeare-bassline-sounds-like are all performed live. So's me laying a turd. And that, my friends, also ain't worth recording. So after Droid embarrass themselves for seven minutes, Craig gives us the three minutes of Sneakster's Ethan Allen electro-dub track, "Twisted," to settle ourselves before concluding with Marasma's fusion phantasmagoria, "The Bed and the Window."

By virtue of Craig's precise selecting skills, Onsumothasheeat desultorily skips over the big-room clichés that far too many DJs mix into their discs-- no "exclusive" (read: previously rejected) remixes of Moby's "Porcelain"; no grand-standing anthems to distract you. Though he does toss in a couple of sub-par tracks, on balance Craig deserves loony praise, since Onsumothasheeat divines unsuspected depth and artistry within vague recesses of the Shadow.

-Paul Cooper