It's too marvelous the way human spirit searches out new ways of combining familiar things-- stuff lying around in the yard (the Wright Brothers' Kitty Hawk), around the office (Robert Oppenheimer's little sun), or out in the corn field (Albert Hofmann and his synthesized ergot fungus). And sometimes, these radical combinations renew civilizations. Take the Florentine Renaissance: scholars bored with the dry whitterings of Aquinas went to the local library, picked up some poems of Ovid and a little bit of Livy, and boom! Before Lucrezia had time enough to knock off another relative, the Old World is off on the fast track to the Enlightenment and the birth of the United States of America.

Sometimes, though, combinations don't work out. How many unpalatable creations has humanity suffered the after-effects of in order to come up with the few that are greater than the sum of their constituents? Personally, I'm fervidly opposed to mixing viands with fruit. Cranberries belong in a vodka drink, not dolloped next to a slice of turkey breast. Similarly, mint belongs in a Tic Tac lozenge or a julep, not nestling up against a juicy cut of erstwhile gamboling, bleating lamb.

Bump & Grind have tried their hand at combination, but rather than being the sublime fusion of juniper berry and ethanol, Init Sequence is far more akin to a by-product of the fractional distillation of crude oil. The band have attempted melding pretentious soundtrack music with big beat, and the result is a clumsy reduction of both elements. The pleasure (note the singular) of big beat is its shameless loutishness. It's beery, good-time, rugger-bugger dance music for people who still think that dancing's for right poofs. And as such, it succeeds marvelously. But mixing big beat's Rolling Rock flatulence with Angelika Film Center soundscapes grovels for trouble on bended knee.

"Intuition Outerspace" combines home-listening, arty drum-n-bass with the installation sounds associated with Sub Rosa artists like Tone Rec. The track, like many on this album, is not only burdened by its title. "Mellow Tek" whooshes ambiently and excerpts heavily reverbed dialog before the heartbeat kickdrum swaggers through the remaining four minutes of the track to little effect. Contrarily, the Tom Waits-meets-Boards of Canada blues of "Chromatic Hipster Heaven" sticks around for a mere sixty seconds-– just enough time for us to get totally jazzed about this combination-- before Bump & Grind bring on the blurpy, soggy electro of "Refresh Rate."

Tacked on after "Nowadays Instant Plug" are remixes by Scanner and Third Eye Foundation. Scanner lays down his usual high-pitch squeals and low rumblings, turning "Hooked Atoms" into a shufflesome affair redolent of his own "Mass Observation" track. Third Eye Matt Elliot, naturally, puts the whole of Init Sequence to shame with his truly cinematographic rework of "Pan Odyssey." But hearing his remix just makes me want to listen to Third Eye Foundation's Little Lost Soul and reacquaint myself with Elliot's perfect fusion of Grooverider and Gorecki.

Though Init Sequence is far from unlistenable, Bump & Grind, on the evidence of this album, are not sure whether to laugh it up with the Midfield General or strike Dieter poses while discussing Werner Herzog. You can do one or the other, but attempting both is bound to end in tears.

-Paul Cooper