The Dirtchamber Sessions Volume One

IN WHICH Liam Howlett, in the wake of the half-great but ultimately overblown shitstorm that was The Prodigy's Fat Of The Land album and panzer-campaign, holes up in the culture bunker, getting back to his B-boy bleach bum roots.

The tactic itself is akin to those employed by so many blitzed rock bands: retreat, burrow, and absorb/record a clutch of seminal works and standards, thus getting back in sync with those road-frayed creative bio-rhythms.

So here, Howlett assembles eight tracks (no titles, and the gaps are merely academic) comprised of cut-ups from four score or more hip-hop and riff-rock classics, plus some quite unclassifiable nuggets, all extracted from the deckster's vinyl vaults. And lest we label the boy Liam as new money on the slum, the sticker on the sleeve reminds us that he did his DJ apprenticeship as far back as the late '80s.

The Dirtchamber Sessions then, is a dizzy and delinquent experience, sort of Jive Bunny on crack, a block party where the conga-line begins in the day-glo graffiti turf inhabited by rap-roots exponents like Time Zone ('Wild Style') or Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five ('Pump'), then extends all the way into the chrome-plated (but still scum-encrusted) surfaces that house Bomb The Bass' beat-nicked classic 'Bug Powder Dust', plus sundry works by The Chemical Bros, Primal Scream and Propellerheads.

And a sprawling but vibrant hooley it is too, although certain of the sequences jar where you'd expect them to jam. Like the segue from The Charlatans' 'How High' through The Prodigy's own 'Poison' into Jane's Addiction's 'Been Caught Stealing', a hat-trick which looks good on paper, but doesn't quite cut it in the woofers and tweeters.

Far superior are more apparently unworkable exercises, like Babe Ruth's 'The Mexican' dissolving into The B-boys' 'Rock The House', both of which drink deep from the frat-brat's spiked punchbowl, then wake up some eight minutes and half a hemisphere away at a junk culture juncture where Meat Beat Manifesto's 'Radio Babylon' arm-wrestles Herbie Hancock's positively Floridian 'Rokit'. Jesus, I'd love to see Alex Cox pen that screamplay.

There's no let-up. One jump-cut later and we're booting it through The Sex Pistols' 'New York' with no explanation, motivation or steering wheel. Howlett is applying more than a little Burroughs ... Gysin here, ribboning the original soundprose, then gleaning new meanings from the recombinant texts.

Some more fluxed-up juxtapositionings: 'Kowalski' meets 'Time To Get Ill' while Barry White lurks around the corner with Public Enemy. Or LL Cool J getting it on with Digital Underground. Or the climactic belly-flop into the pool that is The Jimmy Castor Bunch's thrillingly dirty groove 'It's Just Begun'. By this stage you're either comatose, or croaking for Red Bull and black coffee. All in all, quite a trip.