Wasteland : All Versus All

Wasteland is a pair of electronic-music producers: DJ Scud (Toby Reynolds) and I-Sound (Craig Willingham). Reynolds boasts what I gather to be a sterling resume in the realm of dance music; Willingham is apparently more experimentally inclined. Regardless of their background, it’s obvious that they’re both creative, intrepid musicians. They combine electronic ambience and programmed rhythms in any number of ingenious ways, creating a sound world that’s alternately serene and scarifying, funky and fractured.

Since improvisation plays a significant role, a case can be made that this music is, at the very least, jazz-related. Ordinarily, it wouldn’t matter one way or the other-good music is good music. But there have been so many attempts over the past few years to fuse jazz with (for want of a better word) “electronica.” It’s instructive to note how submediocre most of such hybrids are in comparison with this. Jazz cats venturing into this territory need to master the technology if they’re to create good music. Too many don’t. For Reynolds and Willingham, the technology is their instrument, one they play with soul and virtuosity.

Originally Published January 1, 2007