DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid took his name from William Burroughs’ 1964 novel Nova Express, and his music often had the same disorienting effect as the author’s “cut-up” prose. Songs Of A Dead Dreamer was a dark storm cloud of an album, combining a sci-fi exploratory spirit tied to, if not necessarily rooted in, Afrofuturism (tracks bore titles like “Galactic Funk” and “Hologrammic Dub”) with a thoroughly grounded urban paranoia. The beats often sounded like they were coming through a wall from the next apartment over, as vinyl crackle washed through as loud as a rainstorm and gongs and synths rang and hummed and beeped from deep within the mix. For all its thumping power, it was far better suited to headphones than dancefloors, putting the “ill” in illbient by creating a vague queasiness in the listener.

1996’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer was the debut from turntablist and ‘illbient’ artist DJ Spooky and is an album from the darkest reaches of the trip hop universe. Taking the edgy, anxious and paranoid feel that defined much early trip hop further than it had ever been, he constructed an uneasy, haunted and frankly dark soundtrack for a non-existent horror film. Fragmentary snippets and transitory slivers of sampled audio fade in and out of the mix and drones and unearthly sound effects fill the sound field while distorted loops creep in and out of focus. Songs Of A Dead Dreamer is a child of hip hop but the family resemblance is hard to see, as though the album was taken from its parents as a baby and chained up in a cellar.