The Shiggar Fraggar Show! Vol. 5

Bay Area weirdos Invisibl Skratch Piklz introduced more new ideas and techniques to DJing than anyone this side of Grand Wizzard Theodore. And after dominating so many DJ competitions that the governing body of the Disco Mix Club nudged them out so other participants could stand a chance of winning, their rep for flashy yet irreverent scratch routines demanded a wider audience. This was borne out over a number of appearances on Oakland’s Hip Hop Slam radio show, circa 1995-96, that would be preserved for posterity as the Shiggar Fraggar Show! series. And it’s Volume 5 that captures the Skratch Piklz at the height of their power, when their crew included the turntablist equivalent of the ’92 Dream Team — Q-bert, DJ Disk, Mix Master Mike, Shortkut, and Apollo. As a performance, it’s best in video form — part of the thrill is in watching them pull it all off, where the four-deck setup allows multiple DJs to riff off each others’ routines and the improvisational, interpersonally communicative potential of turntablism is shown off to its fullest. It takes a bit to get going as pure audio — you have to really love turntablism to click with the early stretch that includes minimal-beat/maximal-scratch showcases “Insect Mind Numb” and “Ah One, Two, Three, Cut” — but if you don’t really love turntablism after listening to this, it’s probably more a you problem anyways. For the rest of us, the big rewards come in the show’s back half, where wild gear shifts like the uptempo electro sequence of “Damn You Skratchy” and “All the Way from Frisco” melts into the swampy serrations of “Makin’ Me Itch” and a Mike-helmed two-fer of pure rhythm-violating assault (“Battle for the Mind”/”Hardcore Man from the Underland”) that leaves scrapes on your brain. Stick around for the 16-plus-minute bonus cut “West Coast Rock Steady Groove,” a self-contained mix that shows Disk, Q-bert and Shortkut wreaking welcome havoc over beats from hip-hop’s 808-heavy ’80s before concluding with a largely undisturbed selection of cuts from the Wild Style soundtrack — the past refracted into a supercharged version of itself.