Emulatory Whoredom

It's hard to know exactly what to make of this strange album, which seems to be only partly a musical project. This is that rarest of animals, a DJ concept album, and one that is organized around the theme of UFOs and extraterrestrial visits. Taking movie dialogue, things that sound like snippets of documentary interviews, and various other spoken word ephemera, and using them as the glue with which to hold together a pleasing variety of low-key turntablist workouts, moody trip-hop, and excursions into downtempo sonic experimentalism, DJ Wally seems at several points to simply be making fun of impressionable Middle Americans and their wide-eyed accounts of abductions, apparitions, and — er — probings. But sometimes it seems like his stance is a bit more complex than that; when he appropriates the hook from Frida's "I Know There's Something Going On" and juxtaposes it with the sound of a woman talking about truth as a scarce commodity, it almost sounds like he's not making an ironic point. That's not so much the case on "Yes, It's True," in which someone with the voice of a radio talk-show host enumerates the physical phenomena associated with extraterrestrial visits in the desert. The beats that weave in and around these interludes are generally gentle but solid, and always interesting. Perhaps not an essential purchase, but recommended.