DJ Cam
Underground Vibes

When you hear music after it's over, it's gone, in the air. You can never capture it again.

With the previous line, one can perfectly grasp the leitmotif of the music and the listening experience of this album. After all, it's DJ Cam who says it, embedding it as a phrase within the samples of one of the greatest examples of abstract hip-hop. As now predictable, Underground Vibes is dreamy, elusive music, to be listened to almost distractedly. The compositions are soundscapes, and for this music, it's not hard to paint a long nocturnal walk in a dark metropolis, among multicultural neighborhoods, neon signs, underpasses, and tall buildings. The atmosphere surrounds you, you walk, and the music is like steam rising from manholes.

Second-hand film noir materializes, dismantled and overlapped with lounge hints, laid on a bed of ambient jungle, and in the restoration of vintage flavors in a dense fabric of samples, I find the utmost charm. Loops of pianos and vibraphones recalling certain soft-jazz angles à la Amon Adonai Santos de Araujo Tobin, echoes of minimalism, blurred and relaxing downtempo, with dub references often around the corner.

If jazz, chillout and turntablism are parallel lines, trip-hop is the vanishing point: here is Underground Vibes. Well positioned between DJ Shadow and DJ Krush, DJ Cam places himself in their chronological and (coincidentally) stylistic middle ground. He absolutely does not represent the profound and intense crate digging of the former, but still manages to impress as an arranger starting from a few simple trusty samples.
Random info: Mad Blunted Jazz is a reissue from '96 and also contains live pieces. Also from DJ Cam:

Free your turntable and your scratch will follow.