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Personnel: Herbie Hancock (keyboards); Grand Mixer D.S.T. (vocals, turntables); Pete Cosey (guitar); Bill Laswell (electric bass); Sly Dunbar (drums); Bernard Fowler, Roger Trilling, Nicki Skopelitis (background vocals). Recorded at OAO Studio, Brooklyn, New York. Includes an interview with Bill Laswell. Digitally remastered by Howie Weinberg (Masterdisk, New York, New York). By the time he teamed with producer Bill Laswell in 1983, Herbie Hancock was already an influential jazz pianist who had broken significant musical ground. But FUTURE SHOCK was an experimental, booty-shaking departure that plucked Hancock's visionary music from the rarified air of the jazz scene and put it back on the street where it belonged. The album's techno brew of irresistible space funk and radical turntable scratching (courtesy of Africa Bambaataa protege Grandmaster D.S.T.) was not only forward-looking pop music, but the troupe of break-dancing robots featured in the award-winning video for "Rockit" helped propel hip-hop and MTV into homes coast to coast. Primitive drum-machine beats get a solid live kick from Jamaican funkateer Sly Dunbar and Latin percussionist Daniel Ponce, while Herbie manipulates a bank of evocative synthesizers and Laswell stitches it all together with invigorating Kraftwerk style. FUTURE SHOCK is intelligent dance music with relentless, industrialized rhythms that resonate-even deeper on this remastered disc. Of the three electronic albums Hancock produced in his "Techno Trilogy" (including SOUND SYSTEM and PERFECT MACHINE), the revelations of FUTURE SHOCK remain some of the most inspired and fun.
