On a recent drive to Victoria I received a text message advising me to move heaven and earth to get my hands on a copy of John Digweed’s latest mix, as it was something special. Of course promises of “best thing ever” are far more frequent than actual occurrences, but this didn’t prevent me being in the music shop on the day of release begging the staff to find me a copy the second the shipment had arrived in the loading dock. So, was my desperation to get my hands on a copy warranted?

The first of three discs opens in an unusually melodic and light-hearted manner for John and is a reminder that he hasn’t always been the overlord of progressive darkness. I probably wouldn’t go so far as to call the music “fluffy”, but it is distinctly house music. Certain sections of the music forums have been critical of John’s use of this style of music to open his mix, but personally I love it.

It’s great to see a DJ open up and play across a wider range of sounds as it’s a reminder of electronic music’s diversity. The first mix is a journey through house music and is an excellent mix in its own right. From soulful house music to driving progressive, John takes the listener on a trip that is a masterclass in sequencing. John’s skills in this area are so refined that he manages to weave the music into the fabric of an amazing eighty minutes that crosses genre boundaries without ever seeming disjointed.

From the loose grooves of Babylon at the start of the mix right up until Put It To Bed, John toys with the listener’s emotions, building and fading in a series of aural lunges and feints that would give an Olympic fencer palpitations. But the mix absolutely explodes into life when he drops Boom Boom by Quivver. This monster of a track shudders through the listener, possessing your body with a life entirely its own. Warning: if this is played in a live setting, you will be powerless to resist!

From there, John really hammers home the point with one of the most energetic closes to a first CD that I’ve heard in a long time. The two tracks from King Unique 2,000,000 Dubs and 2000,000 Suns are nothing short of genius and they complement each other brilliantly. This is an exhausting and quite brilliant mix, but don’t turn away for one second because the best is yet to come.

If the first mix was a slow build with an explosion at the end, the second mix is all about perpetual motion. After the frenetic energy at the end of the first mix, the momentum is reigned in to start with, but it doesn’t take John long to once again start building the intensity and the tension.

Everyone has experienced the effect a truly mind-blowing track can have on a dancefloor. The energy of the music and the reaction of the crowd is something to savour, but the trick to a great song is in knowing when to play it. All too often a DJ will attempt to rescue a bad set with two or three killer tunes, but John isn’t that sort of DJ.

John has this amazing habit of making the build so enthralling and so hypnotic that you don’t remember how you actually reached the heights to which he takes you as a listener. The entire second mix is a perfect example of John at his entertaining best. From the opening track, Nick Warren’s In Search Of Silver to Digweed and Muir’s Satellite, every single track is not only excellent quality, but it’s also sequenced in the most logical way possible. Quite simply, this journey into the sinister world of hypnotic, driving progressive is John at his mind-blowing best.

That last paragraph has a feeling of finality about it so it really should end the review, but it can’t because there is yet more on offer. Earlier I mentioned a third disc, and in this case it’s a DVD which includes quite a few extras including an exclusive live mix and a documentary about John called Eye of the Storm. While the documentary isn’t going to win an Oscar, it’s still an interesting watch and it’s well worth buying the CD to get a copy of it.

As the first decade of the 21st century closes there will be a lot of ‘best of’ lists being compiled and I have recently been trying to nail down my own top ten electronic albums of the decade. Most of my choices seem to come from the earlier part of the decade and I’m not sure if that’s because time has allowed me to work out which releases have true longevity, or purely because there were far more CDs released ten years ago. But whatever the reason, CD releases are getting rarer and good CD releases rarer still.

With Renaissance having been dropped by their Australian distributor, the hard copy CD appears to have limited appeal in a world where downloading albums is commonplace, and so much music is free to access. But good compilations really are worth every cent you spend on them and I still get a lot of pleasure playing albums that are ten years old.

To his credit, John Digweed has come up with a release that I would be proud to include in my top ten albums of the decade and it’s a release that every lover of driving, powerful progressive music should get their hands on and treasure for years to come. I know I will.

Structures is out now on Bedrock through Stomp.