An Agenda and a Beat

The agenda is dancing; the beat is house. For this album, DJ Dietrich Schoenemann pulled a bunch of his favorite records out of the box and mixed them live in the studio, just as if he were working a weekend crowd at a club, and kept the first take. Cognoscenti will probably be able to define the difference between the result and a less organic, studio-produced continuous mix, but for those who aren't party to the deeper mysteries of club music it may sound very much like any other. That's not to say that it's bad, by any means: Most of the tracks collected (all of them by obscure European artists on obscure European labels) manage to counterbalance the built-in monotony of house rhythms with interesting samples (like the black preacher on Schoenemann's own "19 Bullets"), interesting textures ("Bomba" by Rex Sepulveda), or a combination of the two (Dark Sight's "Dark Sight"). The prevailing mood is rather dark and eerie, a fact that adds some interest to the proceedings in and of itself. Recommended.