Tom Waits - Big in Japan (listen to tune in video below)

Though this blog is dedicated to electronic bytes of sustenance, every really great DJ from Villalobos to Matt Edwards knows when to throw in something from outside their conventional electronic genre to give their set breadth and make a nod to a world beyond ill-lit basements.

The aforementioned Action Jackson has been known to send the dance floor whirling like a dervish with a cheeky Greek number, something like the tune that accompanies that climactic scene in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

So here is the first of my recommendations of songs, not dance tunes in the conventional sense, that could be worked into sets. (And in doing so, I invite the seemingly hibernating Mole, to think up some too.)

Tom Waits has the voice of a crusty old pirate who’s dared to do everything you never had the balls to and then a little more you wouldn’t even want to. As Daniel Durchholz put it, sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car."

This bad boy, off album Mule Variations, has so many elements, from the rasping brass to the descending swing of the double bass, that could be cut up, sampled or whatever you clever people do, to great effect.

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