ne track on Frederick Landier’s second album as Rubin Steiner is titled “MIDI Jazz,” a fitting distillation of Lanier’s style of techno/jazz fusion. Landier, an avid fan of both sampladelic hip-hop and hard bop, attempts to combine his two musical loves into his own style. Wunderbar 3 is Landier’s second album under the Rubin Steiner alias, and his first to get American distribution. Though his mix of hip-hop, trad jazz, and club techno sounds intriguing on paper, he rarely manages to come up with anything compelling out of the mix.


The problem with much of this record is that Landier doesn’t really mix the disparate styles together all that much. It’s not that he’s untalented -- in fact, his DJ-ing skills are clearly top-notch as he deftly weaves his jazzy samples into a cohesive whole. But his mixing is surprisingly conservative, and he tends to stick close to the original intentions of the samples he chooses. The result, on the vast majority of these tracks, is pleasant lite-jazz, but nothing to really get excited about.


Songs like “An Interlude for Charles Mingus” and “Saoul Jazz” are convincing simulations of a genuine jazz band, despite being comprised almost entirely of samples, and Landier’s ability with a sampler is certainly admirable. These tracks ultimately come up as shallow and more than a little boring, though -- when the spontaneity and humanity is sucked out of jazz, there’s really not all that much left.


Rubin Steiner fares better when Landier’s role in the proceedings is clearer. On “Espagnolade,” chopped-up old-school raps and skipping guitar chords break the artifice of the song, shattering the illusion of genuine jazz in favor of creating something actually interesting and fresh. The song’s mix of indecipherable raps and soaring horns makes for a fun listen, much more so than anything else on the album. “Guitarlandia,” with its tropicalia mood, squiggly bass, and pounding beats, and the vibraphone-heavy “Tango” are reminiscent of Tortoise’s latest outing, but both songs seem strangely empty without the intangible element of real musicians interacting.


That’s the case with much of this album -- this kind of music is just fairly pointless when it’s coming out of a sampler. With the exception of the lovely “Minellos (part 2),” which approximates the electro/organic fusion of Mice Parade, the rest of the album is dull and almost risk-free. Even the occasional interpolation of a house beat or a skipping-CD-player effect can’t save most of these songs from Kenny G-land.