In the beatbox world where producers surrounded by follies of beautiful women toke on crack pipes and slice their sirloin with Uzis at the pool-side barbie, Kurtis Mantronik remains a distant and sober figure in the shade. Then again, he was always about bustling, rather than a punk with a sampler.

The re-emergencs of Mantronik from the old skool RAM into which he disappeared in the early '90s began when two singles arrived recently bearing his credentials: a reworking of EPMD's "Strictly Business" and "Mad", a fierce tune featuring Geek and molotov-mouthed female rapper Traylude. Both foreshadow a new album, I Sing The Body Electo.

"If i'd known then what i know now i wouldn't have taken a break for so long, "says Kurtis. "The four years i was out of the mix really only felt like two or three months. Yet things changed so much."

Kurtis was 17 when he formed Mantronix with MC Tee. A string of innovative tunes like "fresh is the word", "who is it?" and "Ladies" in the mid '80s marked him down as the teenage wunderkind of beats - a natural post-electro successor to Afrika Bambaataa. It was Bambaataa who first inspired Kurtis to get into music when he saw him play alongside Grand Wizard Theodore and Afrika Islam at New York's Roxy. Yet Kurtis' aesthetic sweep was always a little broader than his mentor's. Mantronik grew up in Canada weaned on rock : Kiss, Aerosmith and AC/DC. His tastes were eclectic - R&B, Soul, pop, funk - and Kurtis soon set out to be the Quincy Jones of the beatbox generation. His ambition was to revitalise multiple genres like electro, hip-hop and new jack swing. But as his own music moved mainstream with hits like "Got To Have Your Love", Mantronik found it increasingly hard to juggle his hardcore collaborations with Just Ice and T. La Rock, with writing and producing club anthems like Joyce Simms "Come Into My Life".

"I couldn't mix any elements of the dance stuff into the rap stuff, " he says. "Back then you'd have been dissed all over the place if you'd mixed it up. Now everything is changing because the rap stuff is dancey. It's not the kind of stuff you sit there and bop your head to like in the old days."

When a stint partying with Todd Terry in New York gave Kurtis the taste for finally getting into the studio again, he found that a lot of things had changed. And not everything was to his liking.

"Jungle and drum 'n' bass can become very repetitive," says Kurtis, tipping his old skool hat. "I think there are too many players in the scene now because of cheap technology. What most of them are doing is copying what other people have been doing for a long time. I don't see that as creative."

Whether Kurtis can up the ante remains to be seen. I Sing The Body Electro, which fuses some of the best moments of his past with new flavours, is an interesting if cautious return.

written by : Jack Barron