Pitchfork

NYC's Breakbeat Science, the U.S.'s oldest drum'n'bass specialty shop, could fit into your average Borders 40 times over. But it's survived and thrived while a succession of fickle post-rave fads have come and gone. Like many dance shops, BS spun off into a label. The Breakbeat Science Exercise series of low-price mix CDs are handy examples of the kind of d'n'b that skews more to the center than leftfield. They don't leave you feeling walloped with a 2X4, but you don't feel like you got suckered into buying Ultra Chill 6, either.

So it's exciting that DJ Clever (owner of Offshore Records, mixmeister of last year's epochal Troubled Waters, and recent Pitchfork profilee) has been handed such an expansive platform to do his leftfield thing. (The Exercise mixes land in the megastores, like the aforementioned Borders.) Clever's got a knack for the sugared-pill: mixing up the rough (ridonkulously convoluted drum tricknology) with the smooth (the rolling boom-bap that's characterized post-1998 d'n'b). It's a line that gets skidded across on every Offshore release.

Unsurprisingly, given the venue and audience's expectations, he goes with more smooth than rough. Even the more "edit-y" tracks here wouldn't clear a dancefloor. Some are even (gulp!) kinda boring, like the distorted drums of Cujo's slightly plodding "Time Traveller". Graphic's "I Am Metal" would be too sparse by half-- just a heavy-stepping beat and a tunneling bassline-- but finds its offbeats in Beans' rapping. ("I'm a rap motherfucker/ Wrap my hands around your neck.")

Black Rain, aka Omni Trio's Rob Haigh, rocks the drum machine he once said he could never return to, skirting closer to the "tech-house at 170bpm" feeling of his old pal Deep Blue (who precedes him here) than the breakbeat euphoria of old. Amit's only got one trick, but I understand why so many labels keep re-releasing it: The scowling, strangely muted, utterly hypnotic mid-tempo bassline he's perfected. I don't hear much of the oft-referenced "dub" in his sound; it's closer to something like the Wighnomy Brothers "Wurz + Blosse" on Kompakt. Pieter K's "Sequence", on the other hand, is one of those too-fast pop-locking beats I suspect only breakdancing robots who catch on fire can keep up with.

The mix really achieves lift-off in its final third. Seba's "Steel" trots out the old techstep trick of juggling one beat with a harder secondary beat, albeit in a warmer (yet still spooky) context. After the cold, electro-tinged basslines of a lot of the tracks here, its enveloping low-end is a balm. Graphic's remix of Ezekiel Honig's "Love Sessions" is the best track here and one of the oddest and most compelling d'n'b tunes I've ever heard. It's microhouse, essentially, except 50bpm faster, with great yawning bass groans, flushes of moody synth, and ultra-tactile beats. Imagine Pantytec jamming on "Drop It Like It's Hot" with added tape-speed issues. Tundra's "Deep Sleep" follows in a similar vein, though a bit more straightforwardly drum'n'bass, another excellent renovation of the supposedly exhausted 2-step percussion pattern.

Exercise 05's dancefloor-centricity means it lacks Troubled Waters' range. And that's fine; drum'n'bass isn't required to expand or contract to fit a Pitchfork reader's (or writer's!) idea of excitement. This is probably a little too fast, a little too banging, to win converts. But there are still a number of tunes here that support all the breathless prose I've devoted to the d'n'b revival in the past 12 months. And at a suggested retail of around $7.99, you can probably afford to skip a meal to check out what all the fuss is about. I'm just going to keep bugging you until you do.