*** Le Gooster

ZIG ZAG ZEN

(Shadow Records)

If the nay-sayers could blast DJ Shadow's 1996 debut, Endtroducing, for debasing the black art of scratching and mixing with "white, male rationalist meaning," then what will they make of this solo debut by a brown-skinned mixmaster from Geneva who re-imagines the art form in a Swiss context? Casually moving from lugubrious horror-film textures to jittery jungle beats, the CD's 18 tracks honor both the roots of hip-hop and the widespread branches of the international electronica movement. There are raps in English and French, samples of Martin Luther King and a Francophone politician, doses of Miles Davis-style cool jazz and European trance groove. Le Gooster's disarming multiculturalism isn't as sublime as Shadow's symphonic logic, but both succeed in endowing this African-American invention with a renewed sense of world historic significance. If that makes these two DJs thieves, they also give it up like Robin Hood.

-- Franklin Soults