>From the liner notes: "This CD is a memeograph (a graph of memory) made from sounds recorded live at SoundLab then mixed into trax."

Must I go on?

Well, then, what kinds of memories are we talking about here? These memories, the ones being graphed on Flav-O-Pac, have to do with being packed into a NYC warehouse as DJ Spooky and his downtown illbient cronies subject you to arid post-structuralist theory in sound. In other words, hip-hop beats cut with splashes of jungle, odd vocal transmissions, and all matter of static and assorted dissonance are piled on to remind us of the digital chaos that is the modern world. Like, information overload, man.

That's what this cerebral beat scene is all about, I guess: the changing face of humanity as it confronts the information age. But the problem with conceptual art of this stripe is that an idea can only be expressed once before it becomes time to move on. John Cage composed "Imaginary Landscape No. 4" in 1951. The piece was performed entirely on AM radios, and the volume and tuning dials were manipulated according to a preset score. Now that shit was ill, and Cage didn't need pretentious liner notes to tell us so. Fifty years later, I can do without some electro troop called Byzar driving the point home.

Just to run down the line-up, in addition to Byzar, Flav-O-Pac contains bits and pieces from DJ Wally, DJ Soul Slinger, Toshio Kajiwara, and a dozen more people I'm not too familiar with. Samples from each of their sets were stitched together by a couple guys named Singe and Verb into one long, flowing, chaotic, cliched, and ultimately dull set. Beats go in and out but never groove or climb high enough in the mix to matter. Terrible spoken word snippets rise and fall without leaving an impression. Assorted unidentified songs are sliced and diced without purpose. Sorting out the differences between individual contributors is impossible. And it goes on forever.

The words Wyndham Lewis once used to describe the writing of Gertrude Stein are perfectly suited for how I feel about Flav-O-Pac: "We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through, and all along." In other words, these memories needn't be graphed.

-Mark Richard-San