This came out in 2000 — or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Call Rotterdam’s Speedy J the anti-Fatboy Slim.
Former DJ Jochem Papp lost interest in the mindless booty-rocking groove of the dance floor; now the only body part he wants to shake up is the one between your ears. And he accomplishes that with ease on his fourth CD A Shocking Hobby. With a pallette emphasizing chrome, black and grey — the subterranean buzzing of synths, the coldly gentle wash of strings, the punch-press industrial grooves of the beatboxes — Papp fashions complex, swirling routines of sinister assembly-line techno-funk that encompass the hard-ambient brittlenss of Aphex Twin and the kinder, more cerbral flavour of µ-ziq — and somehow end up sounding sorta like Nine Inch Nails minus Trent Reznor’s incessant self-absorption. It would make the perfect soundtrack for a grisly horror movie about underground cannibal mutants. I’m pretty sure nobody has ever said that about Fatboy Slim.
