- A member of the world renowned Beat Junkies, Triple Threat DJ's and the now defunct Invisibl Skratch Piklz crews, Shortkut is definitely not one to be reckoned with when it comes to rocking block parties and strutting his turntablist skills with crowd pleasing effect. In the same way the X-Ecutioners had documented their history of turntablism on Scratchology, Shortkut has put together his own version - Kuts Foundation - taking in a different catalogue of artists ranging from pioneers like Jazzy Jeff, Cash Money, 2 Live Crew all the way to newer turntablist crews like the afformentioned X-Ecutioners and Shortkut's own Triple Threat DJ's and Beat Junkies crews.
Cutting up a sample of Evidence proclaiming that "the backbone of hip hop is the DJ" is Dilated Junkies by the Dilated Peoples. Produced by DJ Babu (the Turntablist), the tune takes it back to when MC's would bring to light the skills of their DJ as Beat Junky DJ's Melo-D, J-Rocc and Babu start cutting and chopping it up. Will Smith, the Fresh Prince, brings forth the skills of Jazzy Jeff as Jeff introduces brand new scratches and routines (back in 1986) such as the chirp and transform.
Q-Bert, Mixmaster Mike, Disk and Shortkut AKA the Invisibl Skratch Piklz introduce the concept of turntablist jams on Invasion Of The Octopus People a futuristic piece of turntable madness where each member takes a particular instrument/sound (drums, bass, vocal samples and futuristic sounds) and uses the turntable to manipulate it into a coherent piece of music. T.D.S. Mob show how a DJ and MC interact with one another on T.D.S Scratch Reaction as they take familiar hip hop samples and cut them between MC vocals.
2 Live Crew's Mr Mixx speeds up the tempo and brings out the concept of cut & paste with two tunes - Mr. Mixx On The Mixx and Megamixx II as he chops and mixes b-boy, electro, disco and funk classics whilst scratching up hip hop samples galore on top. Shortkut then gets a little clever by mixing up two completely different versions of a tune called We Don't Play first by MC Shy D featuring the skills of DJ Man then by Freshco & Miz. Both tunes sit on an uptempo b-boy beat, the first leaning towards electro beats while the latter sits on a wicked funk throwdown dropping a heavy monotonic bassline while Miz perform his magic on the decks.
Towards the end the mix takes in more electro beats with the Knights Of The Turntable doing the Techno Scratch - dropping minimal electro flavours while the Knights drop samples from documentary records and a cheeky laugh from Woody Woodpecker! Before he became famous for his work as part of NWA, Dr. Dre was the DJ for the World Class Wreckin Cru and he takes his skills to the operating room for Surgery. It's a primitive electro tune featuring deep and dirty electro beats and bass, vocoder vocals while Dre cuts and scratches on the 1's & 2's.
Cash Money has been an influence to many scratch DJ's not only for his scratch routines but also for his ability to rock a club set and Shortkut brings out his talents with MC Marvelous on two tracks - All About Partyin and a remix of Ugly People Be Quiet which sees Cash Money juggle and scratch up the original to create different effects and lyrical routines.
Finally Shortkut brings the mix to a close with a tune done by his own crew, the Triple Threat DJs. Comprised of DJ's Vinroc, Apollo and Shortkut, Bring Da Ruckus is more of a hip hop oriented scratch routine dropping a plethora of vocal samples, drum fills on top of 4 different hip hop beats.
What's great about the mix is that even though each tune already features scratching and turntablist skills, Shortkut goes out of his way to juggle two copies of certain selections, showing that he's always ready and willing to rock the party and impress us all with his skills. It's good to see that he's taken a different selection from his catalogue and completely avoided tunes that the X-Ecutioners had already brought out on Scratchology - not that they were bad tunes in any way, it's just good to hear a different selection. Kuts Foundation showcases a proper history of turntablism all the way from it's infancy in the 80's through to the quirky styles of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz in the 90s.