Various - Tribute To Ramin

Interesting combination of tracks from some of 2009's hottest producers. The first record is the one that really shines. These tracks (aside from the more aggressive A2) feel like flying on a starry night over top of a snow covered landscape, weaving in and out of pine trees, waving hello to the squirrels, and occasionally looking up to catch a glimpse of the stars.

The C and D sides are pretty much the typical output you would expect from those artists. The Intrusion is solid but the unrelenting white noise really bothers my ears. Over the years I've developed allergies to certain frequencies and dub techno white noise really pierces straight through to my brain (in a bad way). Still Intrusion brought a nice effort. Not his best but certainly his worst. The Quantec track completely lacks any sense of soul and inspiration. Not even worth discussing. The Bvdub has a lot of potential. You'll hear waves crashing and bubbling up against the shoreline in the background. The ambience in this track is spectacular. I cannot understand why Bvdub would decide to disrupt this nice melodic ambience with such a heavily over compressed kick drum. The concept of the kick is cool, semi-break beat, never quite repeating the same way twice, but its just way too hard for an otherwise mellow track. This kick drum is so severe and highly compressed/side chained that I imagine it would abosutely blow people's head off in a club. When I play this track at home I knock my bass eq back to almost 0. Sometimes a kick drum like that can be effective, like for instance, if your dj name begins with Yoji and your main audience consisted of 15 year old ravers. In my view this kick has no relevance in a composition such as this and the track would be better if it were completely beatless.

Since this album was released, I came back to edit this review and touch up a couple of topics that I wanted to get across. But I have to say that out of any dub techno release that I have, this double pack has gotten more spins on my home tables than any other record that I can remember in the last couple years. Outstanding release. 5/5.