When I first heard Mocean Worker's Mixed Emotional Features five years ago, it was a very welcome new beat. Finally someone was adding context and flavor to the never-ending do-loop that the electronic music scene was fast becoming. By integrating organic instrumentation, Adam Dorn's hybrid drum-and-jazz approach was at once both arresting and emotional, and took the genre in a desperately needed direction. Spin forward five years or so, and Dorn has returned with Enter The Mowo, a dozen tracks with such diverse guests as David "Fathead Newman, Bill Frisell, Nina Simone and Shivaree's Ambrosia Parsely.

Dorn's talent has never been in question, but it is his ability to reinvent Mocean Worker with each release (do also seek out the wonderful Aural and Hearty), that serves to make his efforts so impressive. Quickly we find that on Mowo he's been at the drawing board again. The disc opens with the audial collage of Chick A Boom Boom Boom. Mixing Fathead Newman's killer tenor sax, big beat drums, scratch and sampled voices, Dorns somehow makes a catchy track from a seemingly disparate mess of instrumentation. This is music that would fit wonderfully in a Tarantino film- it's hip, unpredictable and guaranteed to get attention.

Right Now soon follows, and is one of Mowo's numerous standouts. Sounding like a saxophone knife fight, it is both a clever twist on St. Germain, and a soundtrack for hot summer in the city. The breezy flute of Shamma Lamma Ding Dong (care of Rashaan Roland Kirk) plays nicely after the intensity of Right Now. The luscious vocals of Ambrosia Parsely follow on I'll Take The Woods. Lifted by cascading breakbeats and pulsing synth, this is certainly the most ambient track of the bunch. Parsely's vocals are melancholy and drift languorously above the digital sea.

If nothing else, it is Dorn's ability to seamlessly collage and shape sound that makes Mocean Worker so infectious and important. With so many artists clumsily cutting and pasting soundscapes together, here we have an actual artist mathematically injecting soul into his music, and producing songs that are not only technically impressive, but also well worth chilling to. On Blackbird, Dorn again takes a page from St. Germain, crafting a track with the late Nina Simone. It is another interesting approach, not at all obvious or revealing on the first few listens. Using subtle drumscapes and synth effects, Simone's passion on the track belies the fact that this is essentially a remix. There are many other highlights here, including the closing ambient chorus of Collection II, but I'll leave those details to the listener to discover.

While one can certainly argue that Dorn is simply taking jazz and making is accessible to a new generation, the reality is much simpler and more profound. Dorn is really a director of sorts, A Wizard Of Oz for a generation of music that is all in some way busted, and he's taking the best bits and creating a thread that connects them. On paper that may sound like an oversimplification, but when you hear it, well, little could be more elemental.