John Digweed - Renaissance - The Mix Collection Part 2

I'd read almost unanimous praise for this compilation online, and being a big fan of the mid-90s progressive sound which Renaissance championed, I paid decent money for it second hand. Having listened to it now, I have to stick my neck out and disagree with just about everyone else: The Mix Collection 2 is a big disappointment. Not because of the music- there are plenty of fantastic tracks here- but almost entirely because of John Digweed.

We all know Diggers can and has mixed this style of music very well- you can track down his old Essential Mixes from 1995 that prove it, but here he just seems to get it totally wrong. Time and again he deviates from his trademark ultra-smooth blends and is too keen to try and be cute and clever with his mixing, and many of the transitions are just too chaotic and busy to actually enjoy the music. He also gets several big things wrong. Take the back-to-back mixes of One Earth Beat. Sasha did this on a EM from May '95 and the result was a ten minute dancefloor bomb. However, when Diggers has finished faffing around with the mixing in and out he only actually lets the combined mixes play for about three minutes, mixing out long before the Dream Of Life mix has finished and making the whole exercise pointless.

I also have no idea what he's doing with the second mix of Sacred Cycles- a fantastic track but we only ever hear the extensive intro, which kills the momentum of the disc for a good four minutes to tee up the closing track, which is another bad decision. No-one in the right mind would deny that Compass Error is a fantastic record, but it's a grooving progressive houser, not a climactic set closer and should have been dropped much earlier in the disc. After setting it up with such drama with Sacred Cycles, Digweed needed to have a big pay-off track to justify it, and he got it wrong.

The other big problem is that the discs lack structure. Disc One spends a long time with warm-up vocal tracks, but when it begins to to go somewhere with the Moby and Dum Dum tracks, that direction is lost with a meandering Hardfloor remix and then the murky POB track to close on. Disc Three is easily the best- it has a great flow and No Other Love in its 11-minute glory makes for an excellent climax. Even then Digweed basically lets the mix stop and then starts again from ambient scratch with Children- surely only there to sell a few more copies, because it feels like a post-script in the context of the disc's programming.

I have to question whether Digweed got any say in the tracklisting process, because none of these discs sound like they were programmed by him, which is perhaps why he decided to try something different with his mixing style. Most damningly, whoever did the mix-down decided to turn the bass up nice and high, which means you can hear every transition coming from a mile off. As soon as John overlays two kick-drums the beat gets noticably thicker, and all those clever-clever mixes he makes lose all their subtlety because it's so obvious the track is changing.

The Mix Collection Part 2 scrapes a 4/5 from me because there's just so many brilliant records used, and you can't keep good tunes down. Unfortunately, John Digweed won't want reminding of the job he did mixing them all together.

This compilation has not aged over time; the music is still as fresh today as it was when released....it is one of the few compilations that i still get loads of pleasure from, and it probably signals the beginnings of the progressive house era, with tastes of trance throughout...The only drawback is that it ends with the commerical house tune Robert Miles' Children, aside from this, the mixing and tunes frequently border on the orgasmic...this is a must have for anyone's progressive house CD collection!

This package is a lot more trancey/progressive than the first and revered Renaissance collection, but is no less the poorer for that. Mixed exclusively by John Digweed this compilation contains many tracks that I would happily buy if they crossed my path to this day.

Highlights include listening to the mixes from the dubby Floppy Sounds into the first breezy Judy Cheeks track of the compilation, and Moby's Into The Blue dropping to One Earth Beat on disc1. My particular favourite section is on disc three from Underground Sound Of Lisbon thru to Quiver. There are many other highlights.

I gratefully received this as a xmas present in 1995 and it dominated my personal soundtrack for a long time. It still sounds great now.

Viewing the information about the Renaissance Mix collection, I found that while the first volume is totally hailed, surprisingly the second one has not been reviewed by anybody (yet).

Ok, what do I have to say ? Well... I guess is a mix collection, as solid as the first one, but a lot less popular and "classic". However, this CD collection is really good and sounds much more "actual" than the first volume. And yes, it has a lot more soul than most of the progressive trance compilation these days, that's for sure.