I often mention the 'golden age' of Ricardo Villalobos and Playhouse in my comments (ie - 2000-2005), and there is a reason for that. In that pre-Youtube era, Ricardo was the best digger DJ i have witnessed, always dropping unexpected bombs from all horizons of electronic music in the middle of his legendary marathon sets, which i have attended on quite a few occasions at the time.
Hence this improbable FatCat 12-inch featuring Ultra-Red's "A16", a collective of radical electronic activists normally more on the experimental side, providing here their glorious dancefloor moment with an absolutely killer jackin-minimal-house tune sounding like Matthew Herbert at his best, with a little vocal help from Chicks On Speed. Need I say Ricardo tore the room more than once with that one?

"Garden Of Love" is a classic of bouncy, mellow, roundly produced, loose and sexy UK house with that sleazy disco-funk touch and "paapaaa" vocals that make you picture these exuberant, super-mini-skirted, totally sorted office girls going wild on dancefloors all around the kingdom on a friday night.
House music for a joyful, lively UK working class party crowd 'avin it big time, and which couldn't have been produced anywhere else in this world. Proper!

Almost two years after its initial release, "Beam Me Up" has slowly become a minor classic of its times, always getting the ladies pleased on a hooky disco-boogie mode. The song itself borrows to the great 70s disco tradition, a little simplified on the songwriting and arrangements side : what you get here is basically one good gimmick repeated over and over with a few extrapolations, where the 'originals from back in the day' were often far more complex, evolutive, varied and sophisticated with choruses, bridges, harmonies etc.
On the other hand, the structure and dynamics are more to-the-point than on classic disco songs, thus clearly belonging to the tradition of house music, as the impeccable Jacques Renault remix emphasizes by slightly speeding up and beefing up the original. All in all, a sweet crowdpleaser from our times.

Techno and house scenes have had their shares of seminal 'various artists' EPs in the past 20 years : the "Sonar 123 EP" on Peacefrog, the "Classic EP" on Serious Grooves, the "Hip To Be Desillusionned" on Prescription, the "Back To Basics EP" on NY Underground, the "Underground Dance Music Vol.1" on Big Beat and more recent releases on Fred P's Soul People Music among many others.
These collective efforts cement a scene, crystallizing artists who are its creative core, but also often friends living a unique collective experience, at the top of their game.
Well here you have the 'deluxe version' of that : imagine if the aforementioned artists had a very special festival materializing their unique musical visions. Donato Dozzy, Mike Parker and Gerard Hanson aka Convextion, arguably three of the most important techno figures of the past decade, actually do.
Their music, refining day after day a mercurial, purified, amazingly textured version of the original Detroit and european techno visions, finds its perfect echo in the Labyrinth Festival, an electronic music event set under multicolor pyramidal tents in the deep mountains of Japan since 2000, starting with trance and progressively refining its sound aesthetic until it became the recipient for the deepest forms of techno music around.
At this point of vibes and paths crossing perfectly, as the Labyrinth had became a very special yearly ritual, was produced The Labyrinth EP, a beautiful gatefold 4-tracks doublepack, courtesy of TTE label owner and discreet but highly esteemable deep techno soldier Peter van Hoesen.
It can be seen as an apotheosis of this form of suprasensory techno which has brought the art of crafting textures and atmospheres on the dancefloor into the next level of dephth, and a 'clarification' for many a 'minimal' follower.
All four tracks here are amazing odysseys on their own cosmic league, still I want to emphasize on Convextion's "Oil On Metal". He was always on a league of his own, and his previous releases and live sets showcase a unique ability to match lace-like crystalline textures with the most emotional analogue pads, but on this track he focuses on a more dark and sepulchral vibe and comes up with the most intense and resonant moment of techno to be heard under the moon for a long time.
A stunning, cornerstone release.

Vaguely macabre and menacing, mesmerising yet uplifting was "Maze (Long Version)", a slo-mo-genre-crossing anthem for the chemically assisted that was both retro and futuristic back in 2010, and still is to this day.
Disco, electro, synthwave and bass music are on a boat doing maximum purple syrup and here's what you get. So much atmosphere in there.

Two warm, elegant, very minimal and groovy house DJ tools with this loose and warm balkanic touch, confirming Romania as a key player on the house map of the past 5 years or so. "Double Deez" has this little obsessive jazz guitar lick, where "Trebuie Da, Prima Incercare" is all about booming subbass frequencies.
Subtle, repetitive, experienced DJ material, and certified atmosphere setters.

It would have been a crime to mess up with "Amarsi Un Po", a spectacular, vibrant mid-tempo jewel with deadly bassline from italian hero Lucio Battisti, but Luca C & Brigante did a marvelous job on "Lucio", halfway between an edit and a 'cosmic remix', with extra dubbed-out beats, echoes here and there, vintage synth bubbles and an overall tripped-out atmosphere perfectly suitable to sip absynth under the sun on a summer italian afternoon. A slo-mo marvel.

I love the idea of hits-that-never-were, records you hear these days and have the impression they were always big tunes when they actually went quite unnoticed at the time of their original release until someone dug them off the dust and made them classics 20 or 30 years later, boosted by the internet era.
One of the finest example of that is The Joubert Singers' "Stand On The World" which every kid these days knows by heart and is nowadays a certified classic at weddings, when it was barely played outside the Paradise Garage back in the days. Punkin Machine's "I Need You Tonight" is another typical example, played at many a flat party these days like an obvious, bona-fide early 80s discopop hit when it was actually quite obscure until James Murphy unearthed it on his FabricLive Mix in 2007. A nice little feelgood gem.

Gesaffelstein is that young playboy from the next generation of electro producers in France, heavily influenced by The Hacker. After years of learning and imitating his elder (The Hacker, Dopplereffekt, EBM etc), he comes with "The Lack Of Hope", a more personal work which sounds like a melancholic and tender Drexciya, less robotic and metallic than the Detroit diehards (or more parisian perhaps). That one will stay.