Now that spoiled suburban kids who want to piss off their parents will likely opt for two turntables over the electric guitar, it's easy to forget that there was a time when hip-hop DJing in its purest form existed only in the underground. "The Shigger Fragger Show," a bleeding- edge hip-hop broadcast which aired on Berkeley Pirate Radio back in 1994, comes from this shadowy nether region. The way it worked, the Invisibl Skratch Piklz (who were then known only to a select few Bay Area insiders and the microscopic battle DJ community) would truck a bunch of turntables and mixers down to some guy's basement and broadcast their psychotic needle noise illegally over a 10- mile radius. They improvised turntable- based hip-hop in a manner rooted in tradition yet light years ahead of the what the old school could have imagined. Underground indeed.

If you don't like scratch DJ music you're going to hate this one, as it's all done in the moment-- noisy, rough and raw, with a sound quality befitting its pirate radio origins. But if you want to hear where the modern independent hip-hop renaissance began, look no further. Here Q-Bert, Mix Master Mike, Apollo, Shortkut, DJ Disk and enigmatic weirdo Shigger Fragger (who cuts it up on the decks with a paper bag over his head, like the Unknown Comic or someone) take the decks and composes a dense rhythm collage on the fly, doing it only for the collective's own amusement and without thought for posterity.

For those kids who saw the Beastie Boys on their last tour or are into that worthless Hello Nasty album, here's a chance to hear Mix Master Mike making the purest hip-hop imaginable, cutting up "punk- punk- p- punk- punk- p- punk- punk- motherfucker" over a ferocious groove that would have Mike D crying like a baby. For those into Q-Bert's fine (and refined) album Wave Twisters, here's what he sounded like in embryonic form, with his technique not quite developed but his energy and raw ability there in spades. And for those wondering what the mysterious Shigger Fragger is all about... well, you're not going to find that out here. But you will hear a fascinating document of the world's best DJ crew cutting their teeth in the underground. And how cool is that?

-Mark Richard-San