(Azuli/Stomp)

Oh dear, I’m late with a review again. I sometimes struggle to balance work, home and party life and still cram in the things I love like reviewing music, but normally I manage to get the reviews done before our editors get too grumpy. But I’ve really struggled with this one – a collection of tracks compiled by the godfather of techno, Jeff Mills. When it came up for review I snapped it up -Jeff Mills remains one of the most important gods in the techno pantheon, and his take on which tracks have been the most important and influential over the last two decades should be fascinating. Having been around a bit longer than most, I’ve got a real interest in the history of dance music, and real respect for those pioneers of disco, house and early techno. But of course my tastes have developed and grown over the years, and the album was a real disappointment.

To start off with, I believe with this series of Classics, the CDs are usually accompanied by extensive liner notes from the artist who collected them, and apparently Jeff’s notes go a long way to adding interest and context to his choices. The review album was a couple of badly-burned CDs and photocopied track names in a plastic sleeve, with no liner notes, so I can’t confirm that for you, and am left none the wiser about why Mills chose each track. I really could have used that, particularly for CD 1, which consisted mainly of 70’s and early 80’s disco & funk. Hey, I remember dancing to this stuff, I remember afros and Teddy Pendergrass and flares – but with all due respect to musical history, I can’t say I enjoyed re-living it. I’ve struggled for weeks to think of something nice to say about this CD, and can’t.

CD 2 was much better – it kicked off with Telex’s huge classic Moskow Diskow, a track that still sounds fresh, perhaps as a result of the resurgence in popularity of the 80’s electro-pop sound that this track typifies. Carl Craig’s remix of DJ Q’s We Are One is just beautiful, lush, jazzy Detroit techno at its best. Insync Vs Mysteron’s Audiable Illusion is also lovely – a synthesizer line that glides and swoops over a landscape of tribal drums, at once trippy and well grounded. But the next track is The End by Change, a piece of Casio-tone synth-pop that clashed so badly with the previous track it almost hurt. It is not a bad track at all, but it is jarring in this juxtaposition. This is one of the problems with the collection, is a total lack of flow or progression between the tracks, and while it might be impossible to segue from electro-pop to minimal techno, the gaps could be bridged better.

I enjoyed most of this second CD – Florence’s Analogue Expressions, Bandulu’s excursion into minimal techno Serial Operations, and Noel Howard’s gentle tech-house classic Indulge are all good tracks.  But while there are some very good tracks, and others that are interesting, it is not an album that I could play through in a sitting and enjoy. I think if I’d had a chance to read the liner notes I may have got more from the collection, and the badly-burned CD meant a couple of the tracks skipped unacceptably, but those problems aside, the main test of any CD is how the music stands up by itself. On that basis, this collection is no classic.