uper_Collider is, essentially, what Jamiroquai wanted to be: electronic soul, with vocals steeped in the grand traditions of Stax and Motown, and digital beats straight out of Warp (via P-Funk and early Prince). Obviously, trying to fuse these very distinct sounds into a coherent whole is a difficult task. The duo's (musician Cristian Vogel and singer Jamie Lidell) first effort, Head On, was a bit too fractured (too much Warp, not enough Stax). However, Raw Digits gets the funk/soul/fucked-up beats quotients just about right, and the result is a fascinating work that deserves a wider audience.


Now, I know I'm in the minority on this one, but vocals in electronic music usually annoy me. All those dance songs with women screeching or Enya-ing over some beat just makes me want to scream (or, better yet, listen to Bernhard Günter). However, vocals in electronic music can work when the vocalist's voice is as interesting as the music. This is the case with Bjork's music, of course, and it's also the case with Lidell's voice on Raw Digits. I grew a bit tired of Head On because Lidell's voice was too much a part of the digital effects processing chaos of the work, and never really stood out on its own. On Raw Digits, Lidell's voice comes through loud and clear, and acts as an extremely adept complement to Vogel's esoteric beats. Lidell's voice bounces all over the place on this disk. He jumps from a soft, soulful tone in one instant to a screaming, shucking gurgle in the next. In this, Lidell is emulating some of the great male voices of soul music: Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and Marvin Gaye, all of whom understood that soul music is about emotions, not technical proficiency. "Gravity Rearranging" is Lidell's standout track, a work that would easily top the charts if it anyone knew who Super_Collider was. This is a very conventional song, but Lidell does not sing it conventionally. He allows his emotions to lead his performance. When he cries, "this body will surely drift away," he doesn't sing—he shouts, as if his voice were the body drifting up and away. His voice, in other words, tells a story—not merely by delivering lyrics, but by forcing us to hear the pain and desire that subsume those words.


Ah, but Lidell is only one-half of this disk; Cristian Vogel is the other, equally important half. Vogel is an interesting artist who has many memorable solo albums to his credit (though he has also made some real crap). Vogel has the uncanny ability to fuse funky, danceable grooves (think Matthew Herbert) with more esoteric, "experimental" sounds (think ISAN). Both of these tendencies are in full evidence on just about every one of the nine tracks on Raw Digits. "Soily Soul," for example, starts out with fuzzy, distorted jungle sounds that plop and blurp around until a slow, plodding beat grinds out of the soup of distortion and bounces and echoes around laughter, noise, and Lidell's phased and vocoded voice. "Spilling Visions" seems to snap, crackle, and pop its way into a rhythm, only to then let loose a flood of watery noises and space warbles. "Radianations on the Rise" starts off a capella (with only a hint of an oscillating sine wave), but even this song eventually bursts open with burping, hesitant special effects that seem to aurally suggest the same kind desolate, dying forest that is pictured on the disk's cover. In short, Vogel manages to make straightforward songs (verse-chorus-verse) into something that produces a decided emotional effect on the listener.


Electronic music is usually derided for its sterility, as if computers were less "human" than electronic guitars or heavily processed boy band vocals. Music's sterility comes not from the instruments used to create it but from the artists who use (or abuse) those instruments, the audience that doesn't listen to good music, and a music industry that refuses to support anything but boring, disposable music. Super_Collider's Raw Digits is infused with energy, joy, and (what else?) soul. Sadly, few will discover this, for few stores will shelve it (in the US especially), and few radio stations will play it. Pity.