The brief liner notes to this 2 X mix CD excerpt an interview with the man of the moment and asks him to name the favorites among his commercial dance mixes. He answers as follows: "I think Renaissance 4 (the one with the leaves) is still in pole position. ... That and CD 1 of Desire."

Take his advice, skip this album, and get yourself a copy of "Desire" instead (if you don't already have one). Seriously.

While this reviewer is not familiar with "Renaissance 4", the first disc of "Renaissance — The Masters Series Part 3: Desire" (Renaissance/2001), is a sumptuous, yet danceable, and thoroughly progressive-minded set where Seaman shows his class by unshackling himself from the strictures of the "progressive trance" orthodoxy, i.e., what his mainly white, post-rave dance club audiences have come to expect from him and his ilk. He tries to replicate a bit of that open-mindedness on the first disc of Part 7 here, but only with limited success: the tracks by Thievery Corporation feat. David Byrne and Skystate do introduce some refreshing variety, but by the time we get past the not-particularly-enlightened exclusive Montero dub of Phonique's "For The Time Being" feat. Erlend Øye, the somnambulant, monolithic tone has completely taken over and we plod on, all the way to finish line at the end of Disc 2, and achieve nothing.

Progressive Trance ran out of ideas a long time ago, but the huge demand for this soul-less variant of modern dance music, particularly in the U.K. and continental Europe, has kept operators like Renaissance and Global Underground (and DJs like Dave Seaman and Sasha) in business long past their sell-by dates. To keep up with the times (and to keep their audiences from completely nodding off), purveyors of Progressive Trance have sought to spice up the dreary proceedings with some Nu-Breaks, Electro, and a few lashings of what passes for "Acid" House these days, but the results have remained largely dismal. That a record like Gabriel & Dresden's "Tracking Treasure Down" (track 1.13 here) can still get recorded and marketed today, and be considered a minor underground hit, speaks volumes about the cumulative brain damage wrought by the controlled substances which seem to go hand in hand with post-rave and Progressive Trance.

I have bought a lot of mix CDs issued by Renaissance and GU over the years, and I only wish that they would stop plying the same formulae over and over again, pandering to clubbers who are too brain-dead to know what they want. Respect is a lot harder to earn than making easy money from zombified ravers but, in the long run, the medium remains viable only if the labels are prepared to reach beyond the low-hanging fruit. Renaissance has had some success blending Deep House with their usual Progressive House/Progressive Trance repertoire, e.g., "The Sound Of Renaissance Vol. 2 (2003), and CD 1 of "Renaissance — The Masters Series Part 5" by Hernán Cattáneo (2004), while GU earned my respect when they allowed DJs like Danny Tenaglia and Danny Howells to "smuggle in the funky goods". Those days seem quite distant now but at least Dave Seaman, of all people, can still remember when good dance music meant something more than providing a soundtrack to recreational drug use. Take his advice and listen to "Desire" instead: that first disc is quite capable of inducing an all-natural, Rocky Mountain-high all by itself.