Brainfreeze 45 extraordinaire and Jurassic 5 DJ Cut Chemist was temporarily locked up for unspecified reasons in recent years, but now he's back with a long-awaited new [compilation] album, Funk Off; partially previewed during "an excellent mix for the Stones Throw Podcast called Cassette Culture using four cassette decks and tracks from a release he was working on called Funk Off," it's a quasi-collaboration with 1980's French New-Wave groups Vox Populi! & Pacific 231. Cut Chemist unleashed two non-album singles leading up to Funk Off's October 29th release, "Outro (Revisited)" and "Work My Mind." The latter is essentially a re-imagining/remix of [Vox Populi!] album track "Alternative Fresh," which features select verses by Jurassic 5 frontman Chali 2na and Hymnal. "Work My Mind" is more or less a self-described "future-primitive analogue thriller," complete with a music video directed by Delaney Bishop, who previously conjured up sun-soaked "Concrete Schoolyard" (1998). But quite honestly, Cut Chemist has been making Dance-inspired Hip-Hop like this for years now; eons before EDM and Dubstep were even loose, formative sub-genres!

Cut Chemist's Internet-homebase dually notes that "Work My Mind"'s "concept was derived from a short video [Bishop] directed for Cut Chemist's "Rare Equations" mixtape snippet with Chali 2na, also released in '98." For whatever reasons, "Work My Mind" and "Outro (Revisited)" are nowhere to be found on Funk Off... however, the comp. album and it's companion singles are currently available from either Bandcamp or iTunes. Funk Off is seemingly the first phase in a full-album cycle that will end with a BRAND NEW Cut Chemist album, tentatively titled Die Cut, at the top of the year. While they broke up as recently as 2007, Cut Chemist & Chali 2na triumphantly reunited with their Jurassic 5 bandmates at Coachella this past April, plan to tour through out the remainder of 2013, and Billboard reports that "new music is not out of the question - just not on their current radar." It should be noted that Jurassic 5's middle two albums, Quality Control and especially Power In Numbers (2002), really helped shame my young, impressionable Hip-Hop muscle memory and I'm beyond stoked for a possible new J5 album!