I’ve been hav­ing a sort of resur­gence of inter­est in the turntablist/scratch sub­set. Per­haps this came about from my extreme enthu­si­asm for hear­ing 2tall’s Shift­ing Tides (I think one of my top 5 favorite albums ever). From there, I’ve been lis­ten­ing to more and more stuff like Mike Boo and Ricci Rucker’s albums. These were a bit more on the strictly musi­cal side of things. This, Eclec­tic Breaks’ Cuts of Cul­ture com­pi­la­tion def­i­nitely gets closer to the bat­tle side of things. The com­po­si­tions on this record are cer­tainly full of more tricks and bent more to the trunk rat­tlin’ than the albums I men­tioned above. Think Return of the DJ style stuff. The tal­ent here is top notch, though…and it’s heart­en­ing to know that turntab­lism has evolved since my last major sub­mer­sion into it. From Noisy Sty­lus’ epic “Sum­mer­time” ensem­ble track and C2C’s booty shakin’ team effort “Feel Good” to the thor­oughly hard as hell anthem from A-Trak and Dipset, “Don’t Fool,” and 2tall’s clos­ing 11 per­son strong “Oper­a­tion Inter­fer­ence,” this com­pi­la­tion shows a great sur­vey of the cur­rent state of this music. One of my favorites is Mista Ed’s “Unfin­ished Busi­ness,” because besides hav­ing a great jazzy upswing track, I’m a sucker for any­thing that sam­ples Big­gie. If you like your beats tough and your DJs out front, def­i­nitely pick this up.