As reviewers are known to do, let's get it out there that Thomas Wesley Prentz's adopted tag is apparently short for Diplodicus; the lumbering 8 ton vegetarian dinosaur who got by with a brain the size of your average TOWIE cast member. Diplo hangs now mainly as Major Lazer and is a producer, remixer, DJ Madonna and Skrillex collaborator. Oh, and we forgot to mention former long time squeeze of M.I.A. Wow.
That cuts a lot of ice at Contact Towers, but then again recently we've seen enough album re-issues to be a little bit wary of anything that's barely out of short pants: call us old fashioned like that. Thankfully 'Florida' - released before our hero was much more than an up and coming beat maker - is the sort of maverick work that definitely bears a re-appraisal.
There are occasions where the source material is that good it becomes diluted by being swamped by a plethora of additional "Stuff", most of which is frequently just things which should have remained on some random hard drive somewhere. 'Florida''s second disk isn't that sort of loosely flapping appendage, but a series of works that are just as incisive as the host. We'll start here then, as the Epistemology suite (Really an oddball triptych) that was released under the Diplodicus banner in 2003 threatens some sort of sensory overload from the beginning. The three parts respectively are A) ear punishing breaks and wah wah sampleadelic grooves ('Don't Fall'); B) Weird stuff ('Like Cats'); and C) cod-dancehall-garage-psychedelia ('You're Enron'). Three points of a very wonky triangle, they're miles off forming any kind of coherent whole, but then again that's probably the point.
Continue reading: Diplo - Florida (10th Anniversary Edition) Album Review
