Heaps As, Live In Tasmania

For someone who has spent as much time as he has collaborating with spiky downtown avant rockers (Kim Gordon, Ikue Mori) and with highfalutin' Euro-experimentalists (Luc Ferrari, Christian Fennesz), Gregor Asch (aka DJ Olive) sure comes across on this live album as a gentle, happy, straightforward kind of guy. Heaps As documents two of his live shows from 2005, one in Hobart, Tasmania, and the other in Perth, Western Australia. Throughout the album, Asch maintains a delicate balance between a generally soft and gentle tone and compellingly funky beats; everything is given some degree of dubwise treatment, but there's never any sense that he's showing off his skills as a sound manipulator or throwing out self-consciously clever, secret-handshake allusions to flatter the musos. Instead, he simply spins out warm avant reggae grooves (like the gorgeous "Bin Raider," with its keyboard sample that strongly evokes the Black Ark classic "Curly Locks"), old-school funk ("All'a'ya'alls"), dancehall ("Lila Dog"), and Latin flavors (the lovely "Heaps As"). On "At Least Some Knots Get Untangled" he sounds like he's paying explicit homage to 1970s-era Lee "Scratch" Perry, and on the album-ending "Time for You..." he goes out with a Brazilian flair, waggling his fingers over his shoulder as he struts away up the beach, leaving you to chill out by the fire with your friends and watch the sun come up. Brilliant.